• FL-Sen: This probably isn’t the way that GOP state Senate President Mike Haridopolos, acting very candidate-ish this week, wanted to kick off a Senate bid. He just had to settle with the state’s Commission on Ethics, admitting to a litany of campaign finance violations for failing to properly fill out financial disclosure statements. As far as a penalty goes, though, expect a slap on the wrist; the state Senate’s Rules Committee, rather than the Commission, actually assigns the penalty, and Rules is now led by Haridopolos’s GOP Senate President predecessor, John Thrasher.
• PA-Sen: There’s word of a rather Ron Johnson-style random rich guy interested in taking on Bob Casey Jr. in 2012: John Moran, who owns a logistics and warehousing company in central Pennsylvania and is willing to spend some of his own money to get elected. In other words, another federal-government-hater whose riches are largely dependent on an infrastructure put in place by the federal government (in this case, ex-Rep. Bud Shuster, who’s pretty single-handedly responsible for the creation of central Pennsylvania’s luxurious web of highways and the rise of trucking as the backbone of that area’s economy). Also, if you want to look back at a comparison of the 2010 Senate race vs. the 2006 Senate race (where Casey was elected), Greg Giroux has a very interesting spreadsheet showing which counties had the biggest drops in vote percentages and raw vote numbers.
• RI-Sen: We mentioned a few weeks ago that John Robitaille, last seen coming close in the gubernatorial contest won by indie Lincoln Chafee, was on the wish list for a GOP Senate bid against Sheldon Whitehouse, and now he’s saying out loud that he’s “seriously considering” it. (Of course, Robitaille’s closeness mostly had to do with a split in the left-of-center vote between Chafee and Dem candidate Frank Caprio, but let’s just let the NRSC think they can win this one in hopes they spend some money here.)
• UT-Sen: It looks like Orrin Hatch is not only running for re-election in 2012 (where retirement had been considered a possibility for the septuagenarian, no doubt facing a serious teabagging this cycle), but ramping up for a fierce fight at the state nominating convention (which is where Bob Bennett lost, not even making it to the primary). One of his key allies, state GOP party chair Dave Hansen, is reportedly about to resign from that position and start working directly for Hatch’s campaign.
• MN-Gov: Tom Emmer held a press conference today in the face of a winding-down recount where the numbers didn’t budge, and instead of throwing in the towel, he said he’s going to fight on to the end, and threatened to keep on fighting even after the end, alluding to the possibility of legal action over the ballot reconciliation issue (saying the recount was merely “a step in the process”). Meanwhile, seeking to be the ones wearing the white hats here, Mark Dayton’s team said they’ll withdraw all their remaining frivolous challenges. That’s a total of only 42 challenges, though, as more than 98% of the frivolous challenges came from Emmer’s team.
• NY-01: After another day of looking at challenged ballots, Tim Bishop continued to add to his lead. He netted another 12 votes, bringing his overall lead to 271 over Randy Altschuler. Challenges to a total of 174 ballots were dropped by both campaigns, leaving about 1,500.
• NY-15: Usually there isn’t much speculation that a Governor is about to run for a U.S. House seat, unless it’s an at-large state or the Governor has fallen way down the food chain. If you’re talking about David Paterson, he may have fallen even further down the food chain than that, though (into dogcatcher realm). At any rate, Paterson quashed any speculation that he would run for Charles Rangel’s seat (despite his dynastic links to the seat, as his dad, Basil Paterson, is a key ally to Rangel as two of the so-called “Gang of Four”). It’s not entirely clear that Rangel won’t still be running in 2012, considering how he seems to utterly lack the ‘shame’ gene, although Paterson suggested state Assemblyman Keith Wright and city councilor Inez Dickens as possible replacments.
• Committees: Both the NRSC and DSCC are starting the 2012 cycle from a place of parity: deep, deep in debt. The DSCC has $713K on hand and $6.7 million in debt, while the NRSC has $519K on hand and $6 million in debt. Even worse numbers are in the House: the DCCC has $19.4 million in debt and the NRCC has $12 million in debt.
If Howie Klein is right, and Steve Israel belongs to a House caucus with secret bipartisan membership, where members pledge not to politically target other members, I am worried the DCCC will pass up some opportunities.
Is it me, or do the Philly numbers (06 vs. 10) look ridiculously similar? To the thousand? Wow.
to see if anyone had a detailed breakdown on the NY-Senate races or was working on one; i.e. summaries of where we held close races, where we lost them, where we picked up seats, where we had losses. Seems like Democrats have made gains the last few cycles in Queens and among the old dinosaur, liberal NYC Republicans in general, and, seeing as how the Republican’s majority still depends on holding several different massively Democratic leaning seats, (such as a 65% Obama seat in Rochester, and a 77% Obama one in Buffalo), their majority looks like a temporal last gasp. Though I expect them to a cede a slightly more Democrat-favorable federal congressional map come 2012 in order to get the most grotesque gerrymander imaginable in order to try and protect their narrow majority.
Also, does anyone have a breakdown of what the national vote totals were like in house races? I know Republicans won 50.16% of the Senatorial vote, and 48.16% of the gubernatorial vote; hardly landslides, bare eked out majorities and pluralities even in this environment.
They want to get above the margin of victory in challenged ballots to have a case.
http://minnesotaindependent.co…
Most are probably deemed frivolous and would be ruled on pretty quickly, though.
Unemployment up to 9.8 percent, net job growth only 39,000 nationwide in November. This is “by far the worst post WWII employment recession.”
I doubt unemployment will be below 10 percent in 2012. The economy has to add 140,000 jobs a month just to keep up with population growth. To start bringing unemployment down we’d need job growth around 200,000 per month for a while.
Although Republicans control the House going forward, I still think Americans will blame Obama more for high unemployment.
on flip-flopping and trying to have it both ways on the issue of reproductive rights in a sad attempt to satisfy everyone. Well, I found this video that cleverly super-imposes Rudy’s stance on abortion during the GOP primary debates with that hilarious scene from the Simpsons episode about the ’96 presidential race.
Patrick out. Probably a good thing.
http://news.bostonherald.com/n…