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

  1.  Looks pretty hard to crack right now. The New York Times though has some really nice graphics on the population shift in New Jersey and a few facts. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02

    A few highlights:

    Camden now has more Hispanics than African Americans, Edison now has more Asians than whites and Newark grew while Essex County shrank.  

  2. “Secretary of State Debra Bowen today cleared conservative activist Ted Costa to start collecting petition signatures for a proposed ballot measure that, if approved by voters, would split California’s presidential Electoral College votes starting next year.” http://www.ibabuzz.com/politic

    The rightwing has failed a couple times in the last couple years getting this shit on the ballot. But this Costa guy has successfully done other initiatives. And there’s probably enough misleading other stuff in the proposed proposition to fool people into signing the petition.

    I think this would be really tempting for a Rove-type operator to fund, a longshot for sure but a huge potential payoff.

  3. mayorial race quickly becoming a circus. (I posted this video in the Daily digest post for yesterday early this morning but in case you didn’t see it….) And I thought Rahm would be the first to lose his cool on the campaign trail.

  4. I don’t know anything about the specifics of these races, so I won’t comment about that, but I’d like to say a few things in a general sense:

    1. Now might be a perfect time to experiment. At the risk of sounding way too vague, I’d rather the Democrats focus on mobilization rather than advertising. The latter is important, but more as a supplement, I think, rather than constituting the entire strategy. Perhaps they are already doing stuff that I am not aware of, but it’d be interesting to take a few of the races and try something different. I doubt that they are going to gamble on anything resembling a toss up, but perhaps they could take a long shot race and try something new to see what happens. There’s got to be a couple of fairly Republican seats in Louisiana where a loss is fairly likely that would be good for testing out strategies.

    2. Run a real candidate in every seat. This will certainly cost money, but unless a district never has a Democratic candidate get over 20 percent or something similar, it’s worth making the Republicans work to keep their seats. If nothing else, we will be strengthening the party for the future. Since we won’t have to worry about sacrificing resources for more winnable races, now is as good a time as any to focus on that.

    3. Like I said, I don’t know anything about the specifics for these races, but imagine what a nice talking point it would make for the Democrats to do better than expected or even pretty damn great in any sense. If nothing else, it’d give a morale boost to a lot of people in the party and it give us a few days worth of “Are the Democrats back?”-type stories.  

  5. http://capitolfax.com/2011/02/

    If this is the case, the real race to watch on election night is who wins the #2 run-off slot. I still have my doubts Chico can win it with Del Valle still running, but we’ll see. Braun would have to be bleeding considerable support among African-Americans to not be the runner-up; winning just 50% of them automatically gets her to the 20% mark.

  6. http://www.nola.com/politics/i

    This is really early and I’m sure she could change her mind, but isn’t she likely done because of Louisiana’s shift to the right? Her name is well known in Louisiana so I wouldn’t count her out though.

    Landrieu racked in $280,000 dollars last quarter – she is definitely fundraising. (Isn’t that a lot for the offseason?)

  7. who, like me, scoffed at the idea of Mark Dayton running for Governor.  Here is an article from the main MN paper, the Star Tribune, on how he’s doing so far.  It’s short, sweet, and quite positive, and I agree whole-heartedly with it.  The legislature is about to send him a bill to lift the ban on nuclear power plants in-state and I’ve been thinking he’d sign to give every one a surprise, and this kind of reaffirms my belief he’s playing it differently because he’s about to introduce his plan for a giant tax increase.

    And note the dig on Pawlenty at the end of the article.

  8. http://www.facebook.com/notes/

    15 points over Mike Huckabee at 54-39, 20 points over Mitt Romney at 56-36, 24 points over Newt Gingrich at 58-34, and a whooping 31 points over Sarah Palin at 62-31

    What allows Obama to hold his large leads is the incredible unpopularity of the Republican candidate field. None of the candidates can top a 32% favorability there- that’s Mitt Romney who is, relatively speaking, the ‘most popular’ of the Republican candidates. 46% of voters have an unfavorable opinion of him. After that it’s Mike Huckabee at a 29/47 spread, Newt Gingrich at 25/55, and Sarah Palin at 28% rating her favorably and a whooping 67% saying they have a negative opinion of her.

  9. It’s a bit unnecessary to post here about it, as I’m not going to publish it to the internet anyway- I rather want to go the party-internal route and get a couple of state legislators and the Democrats on the redistricting commission to take a look at it, but still- I’m working on a redistricting of the MT State Legislature. It’s still a bit early, as they’re redistricting in 2014, but still- the commission has already been named, so there’s no reason not to go at it.

    The tedious thing is, really, matching precinct data up with the state legislative districts I drew, and of course, precints and census blocks overlap.

    How would it be possible, by the way, to provide Dave with partisan data for MT? I’d be willing to collect it, it’s ‘only’ about 3900 precincts.

  10. This makes sense, upon first glance, if only because we keep hearing that the nomination will probably go to someone we aren’t hearing about right now. But there’s precious few people who fit the bill of unknown presidential contenders who could also win the nomination, or so it seems to me.  

    http://politicalwire.com/archi

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