Author: DavidNYC

For auld lang syne.

WaPo:

Virginia is a state with no limits on how much an individual, corporation or union can donate to a candidate running for state office, and some say McAuliffe could wage an $80 million campaign — triple what Kaine spent four years ago — if he is the Democratic nominee. …

A friend of the Clintons, McAuliffe raised more than $200 million for Bill Clinton in the 1990s. As chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 2001 to 2005, he oversaw $500 million in party fundraising. McAuliffe chaired Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, which raised about $220 million. …

Advisers to Moran and Deeds said they had been expecting that it would cost about $3 million to win the June 9 primary, but McAuliffe could spend triple that amount, launching a wave of television advertisements early in the spring that could drown out his opponents’ messages.

The rules are the rules, and T-Mac has prodigious fundraising skills – I don’t hold any of that against him. But I’m no great fan of his politically, and I’m hoping we’ll still see a competitive primary. Even though there won’t be a GOP contest, I think the primary date (June 9) gives us plenty of time to turn around and run a strong general election campaign no matter who our nominee is.

The WaPo piece does point out that Jim Webb beat Harris Miller in 2006 despite getting outspent 4-1, so anything is possible – but that was a flukey, extremely low turnout race. I suspect attention will be much greater this time. And I’ll be very interested to see what the first polls show.

At long last, we’ve finally crunched the numbers on the 2008 edition of the Great Swing State Project Predictions Contest. Without further ado (and remember, the lower the score, the better), the winners are:

What a photo finish – the next-closest score was 61! Congratulations to all our winners, and our deepest thanks to everyone who participated. We had over 110 entrants – double the number from two years ago.

If you’re a winner, please email me so that I can send you some delicious chocolate babka, as promised (and check out Wikipedia to learn more about this wondrous treat, including the famous Seinfeld episode). Now, since I’ve been an utter bum and never managed to send prizes to the 2006 winners, all the previous victors (Democraticavenger, tyler, DCal and Craig) can also email me to collect. And if this year’s runner up Tyler Oakley is the same person as “tyler” from two years ago, then that’ll mean a double helping of babka!

If you’re curious to see how you fared, I’ve uploaded a complete spreadsheet here. Note that I didn’t compute the tiebreak as it wasn’t necessary, but you can find those guesses on the third tab. (Also, a few users failed to offer predictions for all fourteen races or entered their results too late and thus aren’t on this spreadsheet – sorry!) And here’s how the community predicted things as a whole:

I’ll leave it to you guys to grouse over where we missed things and why. In any event, thanks once again to everyone who submitted predictions, and we look forward to doing this again in two years’ time!

Let’s get this one started early. Anyone get/give anything good for Christmas, Hanukah, etc.?

Denver Post:

Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper on Monday confirmed that he is interested in Colorado’s looming U.S. Senate vacancy.

In a brief interview, Hickenlooper touted his experience as a business owner and his time as mayor as pluses for Gov. Bill Ritter to consider when weighing whom he should appoint to replace Sen. Ken Salazar, who has been nominated for secretary of the Interior Department.

Ritter will appoint the person to serve out the remainder of Salazar’s term. An election would be held in 2010.

“I love my job,” Hickenlooper said. “I’m in that unique position in that I’ve got one of the best jobs that a person like me can have. But if you take someone like me who has spent most of his life in business and then at some point decides to give 10 to 15 years to public service, and you want to be useful, then you want to get the maximum benefit out of that public service.”

The mayor said he had one “formal discussion” with Ritter about the Senate appointment but declined to go into details.

This is a move I could get behind. Not only does the early polling look favorable for Hickenlooper, he got his start in the business world by opening a brew pub. Now there’s a guy I’d like to have a beer with!

To go along with yesterday’s post, how about we all rank the 15 most vulnerable Republicans in the House? Remember, there are only 178 to choose from. (Enjoy saying that.)

CQ has long tracked how often members of Congress vote with their parties (aka “party unity“), how often they vote with the president (“presidential support“), and how often they simply show up to vote (“voting participation“). These numbers shed a lot of light both on Congress as a whole and on individual members.

CQ has also launched a new flash-based tool which lets you view all this data interactively. Be sure to scroll all the way down for the chart which plots presidential supports vs. party unity – very cool. Hopefully CQ will go back and add historical data (they’ve been compiling these numbers since 1953). For now, you can find 2006 & 2007 party unity numbers here, and combined 2005-06 numbers here.

A few highlights:

• Nick Lampson had the lowest party unity score (57%) and the highest presidential support score (39%), but it still didn’t keep him from getting turfed in his extremely red Texas district
• Meanwhile, Nancy Boyda voted with the Dems 92% of the time – exactly average. That probably didn’t help her cause.
• Good news on the filibuster front: Olympia Snowe voted with the Democrats 61% of the time and Susan Collins did so 54% of the time. Yes, they both voted Dem more often than they went Repub (though Collins’s score might have been inflated by the fact that she sought re-election this year).
• Check out this chart (PDF), in particular the opposition column for the Senate. Most of the names on that list make sense, but one stands out: DE Sen. Tom Carper, who frequently has a poor party unity record. I’m sure I’m not the only person who expects more from a guy who represents a state which voted 62-37 for Obama.
• Tops on the dis-unity list: Evan Bayh, considerably worse than even Ben Nelson. Sheesh. What a phony. After racking up unity scores of 90% in 2005 and 89% in 2006 when he was flirting with a presidential run, he’s since cratered to 65%. Seems to me like he’s the epitome of a “stands for anything, stands for nothing” politician.
• Back on the House side of things, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen was second only to the primaried-out Wayne Gilchrest among Republicans voting with Dems, which shows you that a credible challenge at the polls can also do good things on the Hill.
• And not that anyone needed reminding, but David Broder and his fellow cult members are still living in fantasy land:
  

  The extent of the shift [toward greater partisanship] may be amplified by tighter floor control exercised by leaders of the majority party, said Jon R. Bond, a political scientist at Texas A&M University. “The majority party just won’t bring a vote up unless they know they are going to win,” he said. More telling, Bond said, the partisanship of today is a return to traditional American party politics, while the relative comity that existed from the 1950s to the 1980s was the exception.

  “Even after all these years of increases in party voting, it’s still not nearly as high as it was in the 19th century,” he said.

Anyhow, there’s a ton of great stuff here. Enjoy!

(Via Congress Matters)

Election Data Services has updated its projections (PDF) for Congressional re-apportionment after the 2010 census, taking into account population changes over the past year. (You can find a summary of EDS’s 2007 findings here.) The news is good in particular for the state of New York.

This time, EDS offers five different models for projecting every state’s population two years hence. The column headers indicate the range of time used to come up with each projection.

As you can see, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the models. Only four states aren’t uniform across the board: California, Florida, North Carolina, and Oregon. CA & OR apparently have seen a recent uptick in relative growth while FL and NC have experienced the opposite.

The bigger deal, though, are the changes compared to last year’s survey. The previous version of this study used three models rather than five, but all of them showed NY losing two seats. Now, all five EDS projections show NY losing just one seat. This might hardly seem like something to cheer about for a state which had 45 House seats just half a century ago, but I for one am glad.

So where does this seat probably come from? As it happens, it’s a state known for its sizable ex-New Yorker population. Three of the five current models (and all of them the shortest-term) show Florida dropping a seat while only one of three did in 2007. Meanwhile, Minnesota now looks pretty certain to lose a seat while South Carolina appears set to gain one.

Things could of course still change over the next two years. As EDS notes, the economic crisis has already reduced migration rates to their lowest level since the 1940s (when the government first started tracking this information). A worsening recession could cause even more people to stay put, changing these numbers yet again. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Alright, how about this: Rank the fifteen most-vulnerable Democrats in the House for the upcoming 2010 elections, in order. Have at it!

As you may know, President-elect Obama has tapped Rep. Hilda Solis to be his Secretary of Labor. Assuming she is successfully confirmed, this will lead to a special election to fill her seat. This very blue district voted 68-30 for Obama, which means that, barring an MA-05-esque debacle, this race should get decided in the primary.

I’ve been thinking for a while now that open-seat blue district primaries have been an overlooked opportunity for the netroots. These are often low-turnout affairs (particularly in special elections) where a bit of extra help can put more progressive candidates over the top. Indeed, MA-05 is a good example: The incredibly mediocre Niki Tsongas won her primary by just 5%, a mere 2,400 votes. Here’s another: In HI-02 in 2006, top-notch progressive Colleen Hanabusa lost by only 0.7%, or 844 votes.

CA-32 might offer us a similar chance to make a difference, but only if we do our due diligence. So I’m particularly glad that L.A. resident Meteor Blades has given us an in-depth look at some of the possible candidates. A few excerpts follow, though I encourage everyone to read the full piece:

At the head of the list for the seat are two long-time politicians, Gil Cedillo and Gloria Romero.

Born of immigrant parents, Cedillo grew up in gritty Boyle Heights on the eastern edge of Los Angeles proper. His father was a member of the United Steel Workers and his mother was a garment-maker. After law school, Cedillo worked for the Service Employees International Union and was SEIU’s general manager from 1990 to 1996, then was elected to the state Assembly, then to the state Senate, where he’ll be termed out in 2010. He chairs the legislative Latino Caucus. Although he is progressive by any measure, his actual policy achievements are quite modest. …

The other candidate with a reasonable chance of winning is Gloria Romero, who replaced Solis in the state Senate and is now Senate Majority Leader. Like Cedillo, she was born Barstow, Calif. Before being elected to the state Assembly in 1998, Romero was an adjunct psychology professor at state universities. She’s widely recognized as an expert on prisons and education. And she’s a close friend of [Los Angeles Mayor Antonio] Villaraigosa. …

Other possible candidates are the Calderon brothers, Charles and Ron, both on the conservative side of the Democratic Party. Charles was in the Assembly in the ’80s and got involved in a losing power struggle there together with other conservative Dems out to oust renowned Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. He was elected to the Senate in 1990 and termed out in ’98, the same year he lost the primary race for A.G. He’s been back in the Assembly since 2006, one of the few people to go from the Senate to the Assembly. (His previous terms in the Assembly were before the term limits law.) Brother Ron served in the Assembly for two terms and has been in the Senate since 2006. Neither has much chance of emerging victorious in the special election.

One probable candidate, Ed Hernandez, is a one-term Assemblyman whose chances come in around absolute zero.

Possible candidates Judy Chu, chairwoman of the State Board of Equalization (the state tax authority), and Mike Eng, her husband, an Assemblyman who replaced her when she was termed out, fall politically somewhere between the Calderons and the more liberal Latinos in the race. But neither Chu nor Eng stands much of a chance, even though Chu has a long history in politics, having started at the school board level.

The front-runners may not be the most inspiring of choices, but in a special election, lots of things are possible – such as two well-established candidates bashing each other so hard that a third option emerges victorious. With NY-26 fresh in our memories, this is something I won’t rule out.

Anyhow, who would you like to see run here?