Author: DavidNYC

Thanks to X-Stryker in the diaries, we get word of this SUSA poll (likely voters, no trendlines):

Rodriguez (D): 46
Bonilla (R-inc.): 53
Undecided: 1
(MoE: ±4.6%)

Perhaps the most salient thing to note is that 59% of likely voters in this sample were white, and just 36% Hispanic. (Hispanics favored Democrats heavily this year, so a high Hispanic turnout is key for Rodriguez.) Meanwhile, census figures show that district is 55% Hispanic and 41% white. The sample isn’t implausible, though. Latino voting-age population (VAP) tends to be lower than the white VAP, and the registered voting-age population (RVAP) lower still.

Moreover, according to the census, Latinos comprised almost 35% of the state’s population in 2004. However, exit polls this year in the Texas gubernatorial and senate races say that Latinos made up only 15% of those who went to the voting booth on election day.

If the exit polls are accurate, then only some 43% of Hispanics statewide turned out to vote. If the SUSA sample is right, then Hispanics are showing up at a 65% clip. That’s quite an improvement – but it looks like it may not be enough. Don’t forget that despite the big changes redistricting wrought here, the new 23rd CD went for Bush by a hefty 57-43 margin in 2004 (it had been 64-35 – though I should note that Al Gore only lost by about 7 points).

So I really don’t know if Ciro can do much better among Latinos than he’s already doing. However, he could still pull it off if he can increase his margin among independents (who favor him by just three points).

And if you’re outside of the district and want to help, the best thing you can do is sign up for online phonebanking.

Update (James L.): As noted in the comments by blank, the 55% figure for Hispanic population in this district does not reflect the district’s make-up after the 2006 redistricting process.  The current Hispanic population of TX-23, therefore, is 65%, meaning that the Latino turnout rate on November 7th in this district was around 55%.  We’ll have to see if that can hold for the special election.

Via the Hotline (sub. only):

At least 3 state legislators are “looking at running” for outgoing Speaker Dennis Hastert’s seat “if and when he retires.” Pro-Hastert forces are “lining up” behind state Rep. Tim Schmitz (R), while “conservative” state Sen. Chris Lauzen (R) “has long eyed the seat and is expected to throw his hat into the ring.” On the Dem side, locals are “very hopeful” that state Rep. Linda Chapa LaVia (D) will run (Capitol Fax newsletter, 11/30).

My understanding is that the GOP side of things is a bit more colorful than this simple description would indicate. Apparently, the “moderates” back Schmitz because they feel Lauzen is a right-wing nutcase. This story played out many times in 2006 – a radical wingnut beating a more reasonable candidate in the Republican primary – often to our advantage.

You had lunatic Bill “Brain Fade” Sali in ID-01; Doug Lamborn in CO-05,  whom outgoing GOP Rep. Joel Hefley refused to endorse; and crazy winger Randy Graf in AZ-08 who was all but abandoned by the national party. Yeah, we lost the first two, but we made them sweat bigtime – and Giffords utterly steamrolled in the last one.

There are other examples, of course, including reverse examples. For instance, we might have done better in NV-02 if the Club for Growth nutter had won the primary, and I think everyone on our side was rooting for Steven Laffey to beat Linc Chaffee (though we kicked ass in RI anyway). So here’s hoping that Chris Lauzen wins any special primary on the GOP side.

As for our team, I haven’t previously heard of Linda LaVia. Anyone know anything about her?

P.S. Who’s gonna call shotgun on editing the wiki page?

An article in the Times-Picayune has the details on the most recent fundraising numbers down in LA-02:

Carter, a Democratic state representative from New Orleans, raised $320,741 in a month, compared with $72,485 for Jefferson, the eight-term incumbent whose political fortunes — and fund-raising ability — have been dampened by a federal bribery investigation.

Clearly Jefferson’s support is drying up, though he does still have a $117K to $58K cash-on-hand advantage. Actually, I should say that he did have an advantage. For one thing, these reports only go through 11/19. And for another, as Tim points out, Carter has already filed several supplemental reports (you have to file frequent notice of new donations over a certain size when you get close to election day) since the full report was released.

In those four supplemental reports (called “48 hour reports”), Carter has raised almost $130K – and they only start on 11/27, so they leave out the week between the 19th and the 27th. Jefferson’s campaign has filed exactly zero 48 hour reports.

The article also offers a nice mention of the online community’s efforts via ActBlue. While Blue Majority has spearheaded this drive, I’m really pleased to see that Carter has now been added to eleven different ActBlue pages.

As always, keep checking in with Tim over at MyDD for on-the-ground coverage. He has an important new piece up today about the centrality of Katrina to this entire race. For those of us outside New Orleans, this perspective is invaluable.

Back in mid-October, most of you will recall that James and I launched a community predictions contest. We selected twelve races from all across the country – half of them top-tier, the other half more obscure – and asked SSPers to predict the outcomes. Well, we’ve finally compiled the results!

As we said at the outset, winners are determined by who made the closest predictions in the aggregate, across all dozen races. So, for example, if you predicted Corker by five in TN-Sen, you got two “points” added to your total score (he won by three). However, if you had picked Ford by five, you would have gotten eight points added to your score. (In other words, the race was Dem -5, but you said Dem +3, which is a difference of 8.)

If the math bores or confuses you, don’t worry. Just trust me and James. (After all, we majored in history and poli sci.) We tallied up the score in each race for each entrant – the folks with the lowest scores did the best. Without further ado, the winners (scores in parens):

Winner: Democraticavenger (50)
First Runner-Up: Tyler (53)
Second Runner-Up: Dcal (57)
Third Runner-Up: Craig (58)

Congratulations to you all! At some point, my sorry ass will send you some SSP schwag, but I can promise you that it will not come in time for the winter holidays. (Besides, I’ve already missed Diwali by over a month.) Please e-mail me if you are a winner and would like to (eventually) claim your prize.

If you’d like to see how your predictions stacked up against the rest of the community’s (we had 52 total entries), you can check out this PDF. (Legend: R = actual result; D = difference between guess and result; P = “points,” ie, the absolute value of the difference.)

Thanks to everyone for participating! We had a lot of fun, and we hope you did, too.

Let’s hear it.

P.S. Check out this good article in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune about the efforts the blogosphere had made on behalf of Christine Jennings.

Taking a page from NC Dem Party chair Jerry Meek’s playbook, I thought we could open up the floor to a discussion of possible recruits for Senate races in each of the twenty-one GOP-held seats that are up for re-election in 2008. We’ll go in alphabetical order, starting with the first five. Links are to the Race Tracker wiki, in case you need to get your creative juices flowing, and incumbents are in parens:

1) Alabama  (Jeff Sessions)

2) Alaska (Ted Stevens)

3) Colorado (Wayne Allard)

4) Georgia (Saxby Chambliss)

5) Idaho (Larry Craig)

So whom do you like for challengers to these seats? As Meek said, don’t limit yourself to politicians. Businesspeople, community leaders, activists – even athletes or celebrities (think Heath Shuler or Al Franken) – are all fair game. Even seemingly outlandish suggestions are welcome. Would you have ever predicted that the guitarist from Orleans would now be a Congressman-elect?

You never know who might be reading this blog – and cribbing ideas from it!

After failing to pick up enough votes in the early phase of hand recount, Larry Kissell has conceded to Robin Hayes. Kissell’s margin was an excruciating 329 votes out of over 121,000 total cast – not even three-tenths of one percent of the overall vote.

The good news is that Kissell – in an e-mail to supporters – today said that he’s going to run in 2008. (Quick, someone update the wiki!) This is great for a lot of reasons. Kissell got a late start this year because of the abortive candidacy of Tim Dunn. The late start and his perceived “replacement” status made it hard for him to garner support early on. (I should note that MoveOn did back Kissell’s play with some $200K in independent expenditures – clearly a great move.)

But now he can capitalize on his tremendous performance (in a decidedly GOP-leaning district) which he managed all on a shoe-string budget. (Less than half-a-million raised as of the last report – which was nonetheless quite an accomplishment, given the above.) An early start is so important these days – it certainly helped Paul Hodes a great deal. And I’d like to think that some of the bigger players will now get behind Kissell early, too.

We’ll be playing a lot of defense in 2008, but we can’t only play defense. We need to keep the playing field wide open, and that’s exactly what Larry Kissell will be doing.

Barry Welsh’s Fifty State Strategy page – which tracked candidates for every single House race in the nation – was an invaluable resource this past campaign season. Barry was busy running for Congress, and yet he realized he was part of a much bigger movement. Maintaining this page (which he did with the help of several folks, including SSPer Benawu) was something Barry didn’t have to do, but he did anyway.

And while you might think this project was a time-waster, Barry did nearly ten points better than the last Dem who ran in this ultra-Republican district. Not too shabby for a guy no one had ever heard of, running in a race that was on no one’s radar outside of the netroots. But of course, making an improvement like that costs money, no matter how frugal you are, and Barry wound up with around $3,800 in debt he didn’t expect.

So let’s join with Markos here and do Barry Welsh a solid – let’s help him retire that campaign debt. Kossacks have already made a big dent, but we can chip in some more. Look at it this way: If you’re an elections junkie like me, you would have PAID for a resource like the Fifty State page – at least $10, probably more like $20, if not more. So if you can help Barry out now, consider it payment for extremely valuable services rendered. He deserves it.

(And on a related note, the Swing State Project is helping to carry on the spirit of the Fifty State Strategy page with our 2008 Race Tracker wiki. Go check it out!)

Below is a chart which lists all the incoming freshmen in the 110th Congress. They are listed in order from the most Republican to the most Democratic district, according to PVI.

State	CD	Member	Party	PVI	Switch	Status
NE	3	Smith	(R)	R+23.6		Open
ID	1	Sali	(R)	R+18.9		Open
CA	22	McCarthy	(R)	R+16.0		Open
CO	5	Lamborn	(R)	R+15.7		Open
TX	22	Lampson	(D)	R+14.5	R » D	Open
TN	1	Davis	(R)	R+13.9		Open
OH	4	Jordan	(R)	R+13.6		Open
OK	5	Fallin	(R)	R+11.9		Open
IN	8	Ellsworth	(D)	R+8.5	R » D
NV	2	Heller	(R)	R+8.2		Open
PA	10	Carney	(D)	R+8.0	R » D
KS	2	Boyda	(D)	R+7.3	R » D
IN	9	Hill	(D)	R+7.1	R » D
NC	11	Shuler	(D)	R+7.1	R » D
OH	18	Space	(D)	R+6.1	R » D	Open
MN	6	Bachmann	(R)	R+5.1		Open
FL	9	Bilirakis	(R)	R+4.3		Open
IN	2	Donnelly	(D)	R+4.3	R » D
FL	13	Buchanan	(R)	R+4.1		Open
AZ	5	Mitchell	(D)	R+3.7	R » D
WI	8	Kagen	(D)	R+3.7	R » D	Open
CA	11	McNerney	(D)	R+3.0	R » D
IL	6	Roskam	(R)	R+2.9		Open
PA	4	Altmire	(D)	R+2.6	R » D
MI	7	Walberg	(R)	R+2.5		Open*
NY	20	Gillibrand	(D)	R+2.5	R » D
FL	16	Mahoney	(D)	R+2.4	R » D	Open
NY	19	Hall	(D)	R+1.5	R » D
AZ	8	Giffords	(D)	R+1.4	R » D	Open
MN	1	Walz	(D)	R+0.9	R » D
NY	24	Arcuri	(D)	R+0.6	R » D	Open
NH	1	Shea-Porter	(D)	R+0.1	R » D
OH	6	Wilson	(D)	D+0.4		Open
CO	7	Perlmutter	(D)	D+2.3	R » D	Open
KY	3	Yarmuth	(D)	D+2.4	R » D
NH	2	Hodes	(D)	D+2.7	R » D
PA	8	Murphy	(D)	D+3.4	R » D
PA	7	Sestak	(D)	D+3.6	R » D
CT	5	Murphy	(D)	D+3.7	R » D
FL	22	Klein	(D)	D+3.7	R » D
IL	17	Hare	(D)	D+4.6		Open
IA	1	Braley	(D)	D+4.8	R » D
OH	13	Sutton	(D)	D+6.4		Open
IA	2	Loebsack	(D)	D+6.9	R » D
MD	3	Sarbanes	(D)	D+7.1		Open
CT	2	Courtney	(D)	D+7.6	R » D
VT	AL	Welch	(D)	D+9.1	I » D	Open
HI	2	Hirono	(D)	D+9.7		Open
FL	11	Castor	(D)	D+11.0		Open
TN	9	Cohen	(D)	D+18.1		Open
MN	5	Ellison	(D)	D+21.5		Open
GA	4	Johnson	(D)	D+22.0		Open*
NJ	13	Sires	(D)	D+22.9		Open
NY	11	Clarke	(D)	D+39.9		Open

Asterisk = defeated incumbent in primary.

I just wanted to wish each and every one of you a happy Thanksgiving. I have much to be thankful for, and I hope all of you do as well.

The Swing State Project will be taking something of a break this holiday weekend, so feel free to use this as an open thread. And of course, there’s always the diaries as well. Have a great Turkey Day!