Author: DavidNYC

Associated Press:

Democratic Lt. Gov. Daniel Mongiardo believes he would have the upper hand if he decides to run for the Senate seat now held by the Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Bunning.

Mongiardo told The Associated Press on Friday that if he enters the race he expects the 77-year-old Republican to bow out. Bunning eked out a win in 2004 when Mongiardo, then a littleknown state senator from Hazard, ran for the post.

Mongiardo said he believes Bunning would rather not run than to face him again.

Mongiardo said: “I don’t think Sen. Bunning has the fight left in him to run.”

Meanwhile, where is Jim Bunning?

Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning’s absence during the busy first week of the 111th Congress has raised questions about the 77-year-old junior senator’s viability as a candidate for re-election in 2010.

So far this month, Bunning, who sits on the Senate’s Finance, Energy and Natural Resources and Banking committees, missed three cabinet confirmation hearings and a GOP strategy session on President-elect Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package. He’s also missed critical votes on releasing the second portion of the $700 billion federal bailout on the nation’s troubled financial sector – a measure Bunning has staunchly opposed.

Bunning’s congressional staffers attribute his absences to family commitments and declined to discuss where the senator has been for the better part of a month. He did not return a call for comment, but his office issued a statement saying Bunning is ready to take on whomever the Democratic Party fields as a candidate next year.

I like Dr. Dan for this race, and I like seeing a candidate with some fire in his belly. But is he really trying to goad Bunning into retirement? The CW – which I agree with – is that Dems would much rather take on the Hall of Fame pitcher than a generic R replacement. Then again, if Jimbo is pulling a Pajama Pete maneuver (Jammy Jimmy?), Mongiardo may just be embracing the inevitable.

(Hat-tip: P)

Outgoing Delaware Lt. Gov. John Carney says in a podcast (go to about 19:45):

It’s been difficult to get people to step up to the plate and run against Congressman Castle. I gotta tell you, that’s something I’m looking at right now.

This is pretty big news – Carney would probably be our best bet to take on Castle in 2010. (DE, regularly blue for several cycles, went for the Obama-Biden ticket by a 62-37 margin.) Carney also mentions that he might be interested in a Senate run. However, in this interview, he suggests that he’s not interested in repeat his bruising 2008 gubernatorial primary experience in a Senate face-off with, say, Beau Biden. So if Beau runs for his dad’s old seat, Carney could well take on Old Man Mike.

(Thanks to Jeremiah for spotting SG’s catch of this Delaware Liberal post.)

Yes, tomorrow is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, but it’s also the filing deadline for the IL-05 special election to replace Rahm Emanuel, and the IL Board of Elections will be open to receive nominating petitions. That’ll finally give us some clarity on the Democratic field. The special primary, by the way is March 3rd. The general is on April 7th, but that will almost surely be a formality – Kerry won this district 67-33, and Obama 73-26.

Also, one of the candidates running released an internal poll for the Dem primary. Anzalone-Liszt for Mike Quigley (1/8-13, likely voters, no trendlines)

Mike Quigley: 19%

Sara Feigenholtz: 11%

John Fritchey: 8%

Justin Oberman: 2%

Cary Capparelli: 1%

Jan Donatelli: 1%

(MoE: ±4.4%)

You can find a run-down of these names at Wikipedia. One big difficulty with this poll is that it didn’t include labor lawyer & netroots fave Tom Geoghegan, who declared shortly before this poll went into the field. So I’m not really sure what to make of these numbers.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more polling once the field is set. But like almost all specials, this one will likely be a bear to survey accurately.

Rasmussen (1/13, likely voters, no trendlines):

Jon Corzine (D-inc): 40

Chris Christie (R): 42

Other: 5

Undecided: 13

(MoE: ±4%)

I remain convinced that this race is not like the last however many statewide races in New Jersey, where a not especially well-liked Dem beat a much less likable Republican. Perhaps Corzine can be saved by his money and Obama and Biden campaigning for him. Perhaps.

And maybe Christie will sputter once he hits the trail in earnest – this is his first real run for office, apart from an election some years ago as a Morris County freeholder. (A “freeholder” is New Jersey’s term for a county legislator.) Then again, Christie Whitman’s entire elective experience before beating Jim Florio in 1993? Somerset County freeholder.

UPDATE: Another poll, this one from Monmouth University (1/12-14, registered voters, no trendlines):

Jon Corzine (D-inc): 38

Chris Christie (R): 36

Jon Corzine (D-inc): 45

Steve Lonegan (R): 29

Jon Corzine (D-inc): 41

Rick Merkt (R): 27

Jon Corzine (D-inc): 44

Brian Levine (R): 27

(MoE: ±4.8%)

Levine (whom we did not canvass in our look at FDU’s recent poll) is the supposedly moderate Republican mayor of Franklin Twp., a largely Democratic township of about 50,000 people in wealthy Somserset County, located in north-central Jersey. I don’t believe Levine has formally declared yet, but he has formed an exploratory committee.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of this community, we were able to post a third wave of presidential results by Congressional district yesterday. And as you can see from our perma-post, we now have numbers for an impressive 332 districts. That leaves us with just over 100 districts to go, and as you’d expect, these are some of the thorniest.

The real problem is access to data. Most of the more recently-posted numbers have been drawn from precinct-level data. This sort of information is usually only available at the county level, rather than from Secretaries of State. Many counties make this data easily accessible on the web (some in more usable forms than others), but some don’t offer it online at all – and those are the counties we need to tackle. Some offer it, but charge for it. And some don’t even appear to have websites.

The bottom line is that there are about 100 counties whose precinct-level data we need in order to finish this project – and we’re only gonna solve this problem by throwing as much manpower (or dare I say, people power?) at it as possible. To that end, we’ve created another crowdsourcing spreadsheet for folks to start tackling this.

The first order of business is finding out contact information for the county Boards of Election. Many won’t have email addresses, and even for those that do, emails may go unanswered. So that means we’re going to have to start making phone calls. I can’t stress this enough: Please be super-polite when making these calls. These are hardworking folks who ensure our elections are run properly and probably don’t do this for much money.

Anyhow, if you do call up a county BoE and request the data, please put the date of your request & your name (username is fine) in column E. This will help us avoid inundating the BoEs with multiple requests. Some might be able to email you the data, in which case you can just directly upload it. (For spreadsheets, please upload them to Google Docs. For PDFs, please use Scribd – PDFs on Google Docs can’t be shared. Spreadsheets which exceed Google’s 1MB limit can also be uploaded to Scribd.) When you do, please put the URL in the right-most column.

Some counties might insist on mailing you a disk. It’s even possible that some will only want to send you a hard copy. If this turns out to be the case and you don’t have access to a scanner, please make a note on the spreadsheet so that someone else who does have a scanner can make the request instead.

Finally, some (maybe a lot) of these counties will try to charge us for the data. I think that’s a load of bollocks, seeing as the information has already been gathered (and paid for with tax dollars) – obviously the cost of distributing it is zero. But this is something we just have to live with. Anyhow, if you do encounter a county which charges a fee, PLEASE DO NOT ORDER THE DATA AND PAY FOR IT YOURSELF. I’d hate for us to make duplicate orders and wind up wasting money. Please just make a note of the cost in column F and we’ll revisit this soon in a co-ordinated fashion.

A complete list of counties we need (plus a few cities and towns) is below the fold, and of course in our crowdsourcing spreadsheet. Oh, and please share your tips/experiences in comments. Let’s get to work!

As you may know, the House just passed (once again) an expansion to S-CHIP which will, of course, be signed by incoming President Obama after two vetoes from George Bush. In 2007, SSP made a hobby of keeping a hairy eyeball on the twisted reptiles who voted against providing healthcare to children, sure that it would make a potent election issue (apart from the obvious wrongness of the vote). So now we’re here to revisit our Crumb-Bum Roll Call.

First, a little update. Six members of Congress have taken themselves off the crumb-bum rolls, including one Democrat:

Diaz-Balart, Lincoln (FL-21)

Diaz-Balart, Mario (FL-25)

Frelinghuysen, Rodney (NJ-11)

McCotter, Thaddeus (MI-11)

Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana (FL-18)

Taylor, Gene (MS-04)

Don’t know what caused Taylor’s change of heart (or Frelinghuysen’s), but clearly the Diaz-Balarts & IRL are hoping to ward off tough challeneges in the future, as they had in 2008. Goes to show you that even a losing effort can have a real impact.

Thad McCotter, meanwhile, won by just six points in a totally unheralded race. Smart move on his part – but some of his similarly-situated colleagues (eg, Ken Calvert, Dan Lungren, Judy Biggert) still have their heads deep in the wingnut sand. Quelle surprise.

On the flipside, two Republicans decided to join their crumb-bum-alicious brethren and switch from “yes” to “no”:

Latham, Tom (IA-04)

McMorris Rodgers, Cathy (WA-05)

I’d really love to see what their explanations are.

Anyhow, probably the most important detail here is that eleven GOPers who voted against S-CHIP in the 110th Congress are now looking for other work:

Chabot, Steve (OH-01)

Drake, Thelma (VA-02)

Feeney, Tom (FL-24)

Goode, Virgil (VA-05)

Hayes, Robin (NC-08)

Keller, Ric (FL-08)

Knollenberg, Joe (MI-09)

Kuhl, Randy (NY-29)

Musgrave, Marilyn (CO-04)

Sali, Bill (ID-01)

Walberg, Tim (MI-07)

Meanwhile, three Republicans couldn’t save themselves even with S-CHIP “ayes”:

English, Phil (PA-03)

Porter, Jon (NV-03)

Shays, Chris (CT-04)

Indeed, every freshman Democrat except for Bobby Bright (sheesh) voted for the bill. (The only other Dem holdout was Jim Marshall. Enough already.) A number of freshman Republicans voted yes as well:

Austria, Steve (OH-07)

Cao, Joseph (LA-02)

Lance, Leonard (NJ-07)

Lee, Chris (NY-26)

Paulsen, Erik (MN-03)

Thompson, Glenn (PA-05)

Cao we know about. Lance, Paulsen and to some extent Lee are in competitive districts. I’m not sure what explains Thompson’s or Austria’s votes, though.

In any event, the good news is two-fold: This expansion of S-CHIP will finally be signed into law, and plenty of GOPers are still fool enough to vote against extremely popular legislation that helped do in a number of their caucus-mates. I’m really liking 2009 so far.

Last Tuesday night, before I went to bed, I noticed that I couldn’t access the Swing State Project. I figured it was a temporary hiccup that would clear itself up before long. On Wednesday morning, though, as I’m sure every SSP reader noticed, the site was still inaccessible.

A post at SoapBlox, whose software powers this site and many others, sent my heart through my chest: Hackers had gained access to the servers and had apparently wiped out untold reams of data. Two years of SSP posts, diaries, comments, jokes – all gone. It was worse than my worst nightmare, because I never imagined anything like this.

Fortunately – extremely fortunately – after a few hours of frantic behind-the-scenes scrambling, sites started coming back online, including SSP. We can’t say for sure just yet, but mercifully, our archives look to be intact. Still, it was a truly terrible morning.

And it came about because we’d been asking too much of one man, Paul Preston, for whom SoapBlox was and is a labor of love that, of necessity, has to come after his day job. However, BlogPAC has stepped up and put forth a detailed plan for ensuring SoapBlox’s future security and stability.

Of course, this sort of thing takes money. BlogPAC’s plan will cost $17,400 to implement. While I’d always prefer to ask you to donate to Democratic candidates for office, this too is a worthy cause.  Over 100 progressive blogs rely on SoapBlox, which offers critical community-building features found on no other blogging platform. In particular, only SoapBlox provides, out-of-the-box, the user diaries which separate ordinary blogs from true communities.

I love what we’ve built here at SSP and I couldn’t be prouder. As I’ve often said, the biggest and best part of our success comes from having a dedicated and enthusiastic group of readers, commenters and diarists. While Swing State could surely move to another software platform if we absolutely had to, I know things would just not be the same.

It goes without saying things are tough economically, so I know this is not an ideal time for an ask. But if you can spare a few bucks to put SoapBlox back on surer footing, we’d be exceptionally grateful. Thank you.

UPDATE: Non-U.S. readers can donate via PayPal (click on the button below). Paul informs us that so far $50 has come through via PayPal, which means we are still about $350 short of our goal. If you’d like to see a list of some of the concrete changes already taking place at SoapBlox, check out this post.

Rasmussen (1/6, likely voters, no trendlines):

Caroline Kennedy (D): 51

Peter King (R): 33

Other: 9

Undecided: 7

(MoE: ±4.5%)

A rather different picture from PPP’s poll earlier in the week, though it’s a bit hard to compare directly since Rasmussen for whatever reason did not also ask about Cuomo. (They also failed to test DavidNYC vs. King.) I am a little mystified about Rasmu’s choice to use a likely voter screen some two years before any election – how can they possibly judge that?

Anyhow, we should finally have our answer as to who the next junior senator from New York will be in a couple of weeks. Can’t happen soon enough.

Farleigh Dickinson (1/2-7, registered voters, no trendlines):

Jon Corzine (D-inc): 40

Chris Christie (R): 33

Undecided: 26

Jon Corzine (D-inc): 46

Steve Lonegan (R): 28

Undecided: 26

Jon Corzine (D-inc): 43

Rick Merkt (R): 23

Undecided: 33

(MoE: ±3.5%)

Chris Christie is the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey who just filed papers to run. He’s been touted for a while, and from the looks of at least this poll, he could make it a serious contest. And with Obama about to take office, Christie will be replaced (zomg! Obama’s politicizing the DOJ!), so he’ll be able to devote his full attention to this race.

Lonegan is the hyper-conservative former mayor of Bogota, a north Jersey “borough” with a population roughly the size of modern-day Wasilla, Alaska. He also took a stab at this race four years ago, coming in fourth in the seven-person primary won by Doug Forrester. Merkt, meanwhile, is a state Assemblyman who represents a district that’s also in northern New Jersey. Both declared in 2008.

I’d be pretty surprised if Christie didn’t win the primary. Jersey Republicans haven’t won a single statewide race since 1997, but ever since wingnut Brett Schundler’s disastrous run for governor in 2001, they’ve typically been able to put forth their least-sucky candidates. And right now, Christie is in the driver’s seat for the primary:

Christie: 32

Lonegan: 15

Merkt: 5

Undecided: 47

The self-funder Corzine will have no shortage of cash, but his favorables are under water at 42-44 (his job approval is a bit better, 46-40). With a wretched economic climate as backdrop, he’ll likely have a titanic struggle on his hands if Christie can prove himself at all competent as a campaigner. The scary thing is that Christie only has 44% name rec in the poll. That’s a lot of room to grow. Corzine should be very concerned.

(Hat-tip: Political Wire)

Roll Call:

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), who won a third term in November in a race that was closer than many Republicans would have liked, is expected to create an exploratory committee for a possible run for state attorney general in 2010, two Texas media outlets reported Thursday evening.

The current attorney general, Greg Abbott (R), is contemplating running for lieutenant governor next year – or for Senate if Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R) resigns early to pursue a gubernatorial bid.

This might be the most exciting House open seat news so far this cycle. McCaul won with just 54% of the vote in November, and 55% two years earlier. This district always looked more competitive than its (old) PVI of R+13, in large part due to an ongoing demographic sea change – in particular, Hispanic growth here has been through the roof.

I’d also be willing to bet that Bush’s numbers were inflated here due to a home state effect – and that Obama did better than Kerry’s 38%. The real question is whether there is something “wrong” with McCaul that’s kept his numbers down – and, consequently, would we be better off running against him or with an open seat? I’ll note that the DCCC didn’t spend a dime on this district, but first-time candidate Larry Joe Doherty did raise an impressive $1.2 million in his losing bid.

If McCaul bails, Doherty could conceivably run again, as could international affairs consultant Dan Grant, who ran in the primary against Doherty in 2008. My question to you: Are there any other strong candidate who might be tempted to run if there’s an open seat?