Author: DavidNYC

Tough news, sports fans:

Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) said Wednesday that he will seek reelection in 2008, casting aside rumors of his impending retirement.

Cochran, who will turn 70 next month, has not raised a lot of money this cycle but had previously said he planned to run for reelection.

“While I delayed making this decision until after our state and local government elections were over, there is no reason to delay any longer,” Cochran said in a statement. “I have enjoyed serving in the Senate, and I am highly honored to have had the support and encouragement to continue this service from friends throughout the state.”

Blah blah blah. Anyhow, this would have been a fun race had former state AG Mike Moore (D) gotten involved. Will he ever have another shot? There was some speculation that Sen. Trent Lott, whose home was destroyed in Katrina, might retire last year, but that of course didn’t happen. Gov. Haley Barbour was just re-elected this year, and Cochran’s seat presumably will be safe next year.

I don’t doubt that Moore is enjoying life right now, but if he wants to get back into politics, what’s his angle?

(Hat-tip: TPM EC.)

Follow this link for a cool new SSP feature: a sortable calendar containing congressional filing deadlines, primary dates and run-off dates. The best part is that you can click on the column headers to re-arrange the list. So you can view things alphabetically by state, or chronologically by filing deadline or primary date.

We’ve drawn on data collected by the FEC (PDF), so it should be accurate. But if you notice anything that looks amiss, kindly let us know. Please note, though, that the SSP calendar does not contain presidential data. The FEC file does have that information, and the Green Papers does an admirable job of keeping up-to-date with the constantly shifting presidential primary calendar.

In any event, please check out our calendar and let us know if it works for you. I’ve tried it successfully in both Firefox and IE for Windows, but not on a Mac. Just make sure you have JavaScript enabled. We’ll also place a permalink to it in our new “Resources” section on the right-hand sidebar. (Look just below the “About the Site” section.)  Thanks, and enjoy!

Click Column Headers to Sort

State	Filing Deadline	Primary	Run-Off
Alabama	04/04/08	06/03/08	07/15/08
Alaska	06/02/08	08/26/08
Arizona	06/04/08	09/02/08
Arkansas	03/10/08	05/20/08	06/10/08
California	03/07/08	06/03/08
Colorado	05/29/08	08/12/08
Connecticut †	05/24/08	08/12/08
Delaware	07/25/08	09/09/08
Florida	05/02/08	08/26/08
Georgia	05/02/08	07/15/08	08/05/08
Hawaii	07/22/08	09/20/08
Idaho	03/21/08	05/27/08
Illinois	11/05/07	02/05/08
Indiana	02/22/08	05/06/08
Iowa	03/14/08	06/03/08
Kansas	06/10/08	08/05/08
Kentucky	01/29/08	05/20/08
Louisiana *	07/11/08	10/04/08	11/04/08
Maine	03/15/08	06/10/08
Maryland	12/03/07	02/12/08
Massachusetts	06/03/08	09/16/08
Michigan	05/13/08	08/05/08
Minnesota ‡	07/15/08	09/09/08
Mississippi	01/11/08	03/11/08	04/01/08
Missouri	03/25/08	08/05/08
Montana	03/20/08	06/03/08
Nebraska	03/03/08	05/13/08
Nevada	05/16/08	08/12/08
New Hampshire	06/13/08	09/09/08
New Jersey	04/07/08	06/03/08
New Mexico	02/12/08	06/03/08
New York	07/10/08	09/09/08
North Carolina	02/29/08	05/06/08	06/24/08
North Dakota	04/11/08	06/10/08
Ohio	01/04/08	03/04/08
Oklahoma	06/04/08	07/29/08	08/26/08
Oregon	03/11/08	05/20/08
Pennsylvania	02/12/08	04/22/08
Rhode Island	06/25/08	09/09/08
South Carolina	03/31/08	06/10/08	06/24/08
South Dakota	03/25/08	06/03/08	06/17/08
Tennessee	04/03/08	08/07/08
Texas	01/02/08	03/04/08	04/08/08
Utah	03/17/08	06/24/08
Vermont	07/21/08	09/09/08
Virginia §	04/11/08	06/10/08
Washington	06/06/08	08/19/08
West Virginia	01/26/08	05/13/08
Wisconsin	07/08/08	09/09/08
Wyoming	05/30/08	08/19/08

† Connecticut’s filing deadline is fourteen days after state party conventions are held. The Democratic convention was held on May 10, 2008. The Connecticut Republican Party did not hold a statewide convention this year, but did hold individual congressional district conventions, also on May 10, 2008.

‡ Minnesota Democrats held individual congressional district conventions throughout April and May and held a state convention June 6-8, 2008. Traditionally, the party endorses candidates at these conventions. These endorsees become all-but-official nominees, usually rendering the primary a mere formality.

§ The Virginia Republican Party chose to nominate its Senate candidate via convention rather than via primary election.

* Due to Hurricane Gustav, Louisiana moved its primary from Sept. 6, 2008 to Oct. 4, 2008. Run-offs for LA-02 and LA-04 will be held on Nov. 4th and the general election for those races will be held on Dec. 6th. All other races will conduct normal general elections on Nov. 4th.

Note: Sorting by runoff date is not available.

Source: FEC.gov (PDF) (p. 3-4).

One of the first candidates of the 2008 cycle that we added to the Blue Majority ActBlue list was Donna Edwards. By now, I’m sure many Swing State Project readers are intimately familiar with this race. Maryland’s 4th CD is a whopping D+30. By way of contrast, there isn’t a single red district that’s this Republican (UT-03 is R+26), so you know this is extremely solid blue ground.

And it should, therefore, be home to a loyal team player, a progressive leader who has the luxury of taking bold stands which also happen to be perfectly in tune with his or her constituents. After all, you don’t vote 78% for John Kerry and hope you wind up with a Lieberdem representing you.

But sadly, that just about describes Al Wynn. If you looked at his voting record alone and were feeling extremely charitable, you might imagine he sits in a precarious seat. Of course, it’s not even close – but take a look at a few of the gems he’s managed to rack up on his resume:

• Wynn voted for the resolution authorizing Bush to use force in Iraq (aka the AUMF)
• He voted for the odious bankruptcy bill
• He voted for the 2005 energy bill, which was little more than a huge mess of subsidies for Dick Cheney’s oil buddies
• He co-sponsored the anti-net neutrality COPE Act and also voted against Rep. Ed Markey’s pro-net neutrality amendment to the bill

Needless to say, MD-04 deserves a lot better. And that’s why Blue Majority – along with a wide array of other blogs and coalitions – is supporting Donna Edwards. Edwards, you may recall, pummelled Wynn within an inch of his political life last year – as a mostly unknown, surprise challenger, she came within just 3.5% of victory.

Next year, Edwards – a bonafide movement progressive – has the chance to finish the job. Wynn, who somnambulated through his last election, has sensed the threat and called in some big establishment guns to raise mega-bucks for him this weekend. The netroots are pushing back, with the goal of raising $100,000 for Edwards by Sunday.

Many hands, as they say, make light work, and I think, on the strength of this broad blogosphere-wide push, we can hit this goal. Donations of any size help, and with the primary still ten months away, small donor list-building is still a valuable exercise, especially for an insurgent candidate like Edwards. So if you can pitch in, please do so!

And, as always, if you’re able to give, please let us know about it in comments.

Reasearch 2000 for the Lexington Herald Leader (PDF), taken Oct. 22-24 (likely voters, no trendlines):

Chandler (D): 41
McConnell (R-inc.): 46
Undecided: 13

Stumbo (D): 37
McConnell (R-inc.): 46
Undecided: 17

Luallen (D): 40
McConnell (R-inc.): 45
Undecided: 15

Horne (D): 34
McConnell (R-inc.): 45
Undecided: 21
(MoE: ±4%)

They say you can’t tell the players without a program. So:

• Ben Chandler currently represents Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District. He lost a gubernatorial race to Gov. Ernie Fletcher in 2003, but held statewide office for many years prior.
• Crit Luallen is Kentucky’s State Auditor. She is seeking re-election to that post this year. The same poll discussed in this post also shows Luallen with a commanding 55-33 lead in the auditor’s race.
• Greg Stumbo is the outgoing state Attorney General. He is probably best known for bringing charges against Fletcher over the latter’s corrupt state hiring practices. Stumbo ran for the Dem Lt. Gov. nod earlier this year on a ticket with Bruce Lunsford, but the pair lost to Steve Beshear and Daniel Mongiardo.
• Andrew Horne is a Marine who lost a primary last year to John Yarmuth in KY-03. (Yarmuth of course went on to defeat GOP Rep. Anne Northup in one of the bigger upsets of 2006.)

The most interesting thing here is not just that McConnell is held under 50% by all comers, but by the fact that he gets the same score no matter who he goes up against. Horne only has 45% name rec (which actually strikes me as high), and yet he still keeps McConnell at 45%.

This undoubtedly has a lot to do with McConnell’s weak favorability rating – just 47-46, with 25% saying their opinion is “very” unfavorable. This is in line with SUSA’s numbers (49-46). I’ll note that McConnell’s internal polling (apparently provided to the newspaper in this accompanying article) has him at 55-32, but when set against the Herald-Leader and SUSA numbers, this survey is an outlier.

The favorability numbers for McConnell’s potential challengers:

Chandler: 57-31
Luallen: 56-21
Stumbo: 49-38
Horne: 36-9

Chandler has said he won’t run, but he hasn’t issued any Shermanesque statements. Luallen is obviously waiting until after the upcoming elections. Stumbo and Horne are both in exploratory modes. No matter who our nominee ultimately is, Mitch McConnell is looking awfully weak for a Republican party leader sitting in a red state. This could definitely be a pick-up opportunity if we see another wave election.

CQ Politics:

A Dec. 11 special election will be held to fill the vacant seat in Virginia’s 1st Congressional District. The winner will succeed Republican Jo Ann Davis, who died Oct. 6 of breast cancer while serving her fourth House term.

Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine on Tuesday set the special election date, which is just seven weeks away. The special election will be a one-shot deal, with no primary contests: Democratic and Republican officials in the 1st District will select their parties’ nominees – and the timing of the selection process is likely to turn the special election campaign into an all-out sprint.

Republicans are expected to pick their candidate at a convention on Nov. 17. According to the state GOP, about two-dozen Republicans are seeking the seat or considering doing so.

…

It’s not certain when the local Democrats will hold their nominating convention, nor is it clear who will run on the Democratic side.

CQ also points out that the election to replace Rep. Paul Gillmor is the same day. The primary for that race is Nov. 6th.

Race Tracker: VA-01

No later than the 15th day after the end of all quarters save the fourth, campaigns must file their fundraising reports with the FEC. For the third quarter, that much-anticipated day is today. As we’ve seen, many campaigns choose to file early, but we should still expect to see a flood of reports, at least from House candidates.

Senate reports are also due today, but thanks to truly insane regulations, these reports are filed in hardcopy and then, at great expense and lousy resolution, scanned in electronically. This doesn’t just cost money, it takes time as well – there’s at least a three-to-four week lag before these reports become available. That means reports from the third quarter next year won’t even be available until after the election! (For more on this insane state of affairs – which is entirely the fault of the Republicans – and what you can do to help, read Adam B here.)

Obviously, this is wildly unacceptable in this modern age. So I have a piece of advice for smart Senate campaigns across the country: post your filings on your websites. Not just a press release with your totals raised and on-hand – I’m talking about the entire PDF, or better yet, an Excel spreadsheet. Not only should these campaigns have nothing to hide, there’s nothing they can hide, because all this information will become public soon anyway.

This also leads me to another point. In the online era, the concept of quarterly filings seems rather antique. While I doubt that hidebound legislators would ever go in for this, I think some form of rolling disclosures would make a lot more sense. On one occasion, I worked in the finance department of a campaign, and we had to track donations daily anyway. Shooting this information over to the FEC on, say, a weekly basis would have meant almost zero additional work, except perhaps hitting “upload.”

The fact is, some form of this is already happening now. ActBlue updates totals in real time, and a growing number of campaigns use it as their exclusive online donation mechanism. Obviously these numbers don’t reflect checks received at live events and the like, but as ever-increasing amounts of money are contributed on the Internet, ActBlue totals are becoming more meaningful.

Like I say, I’m sure most politicians would resist this sort of reform. But with things like ActBlue and Dean bats pushing them, some smart campaigns will embrace this sort of open-ness.

In the meantime, though, I’m looking forward to all the third quarter reports. James will have a mammoth chart of all available numbers as soon as it’s feasible, but for now, you can catch up on all the early reports at these links:

Fundraising Reports | Son of… | Bride of… | Revenge of… | Indiana Jones and…

Stuart Rothenberg approvingly quotes this anonymous bit of advice from a Republican consultant to the GOP on S-CHIP (sub. req.):

So what advice would this Republican give his party’s Members of Congress? “If I were in a swing district, I’d vote to override. There’s no way I’d take a bullet on this. But if I were in a good Republican district, I’d vote to sustain the veto.”

Leaving aside the obvious questions of the morality of this stance, does this even make for good advice?  Amy Walter intimates that the answer is no (sub. req.):

But the political environment is actually worse than it was at this point two years ago, making it very dangerous to assume that a GOP-leaning district will perform exactly as it had four years ago. A depressed GOP base, a very motivated Democratic base and independents still sour on Republicans all works against a return to normal. (Emphasis added.)

And today, a New York Times article on how badly the GOP is hemorrhaging over its opposition to health care for children includes this aside:

Worried about increasing departures, the House leadership has been encouraging Representative Steve Pearce of New Mexico to forgo a run for the Senate and avoid opening a second Republican-held House seat in a state where Democrats are gaining strength. A fellow Republican, Representative Heather A. Wilson, is already running for the seat being vacated by Senator Pete V. Domenici.

Pearce’s district, NM-02, is R+5.7. It went for Bush by a wide 58-41 margin in 2004. Pearce won with 60% of the vote in 2004, and, despite the huge Dem year, with the same total in 2006. In other words, this is not ordinarily a district you’d consider competitive.

But the fact that the NRCC is begging Pearce to stay put says otherwise. It gives a lot of credence to Walter’s observation, and makes you wonder about the kind of advice Republicans on the Hill are getting – and listening to. The NRCC seems to understand what time it is, but it sure looks like a lot of GOPers are happy to let themselves get surprised by another potential blue wave.

(Bumped – promoted by DavidNYC)

This is the first installment in what – thanks to the mendacity of the modern GOP – I have no doubt will be a recurring series on the Swing State Project. Finding Republican crumb-bums is even easier than getting blitzed at YearlyKos – but deciding which acts of Republican crumb-bummery to highlight… now that is a challenge.

Fortunately, we’re up to that challenge. And a little-noticed vote in Congress last week provides us with an almost vintage example of Republican stone-heartedness in action. On October 2nd, the House passed H.R. 2828, a bill sponsored by Jesse Jackson, Jr., by a 409-12 margin. What does this bill do?

[It] provide[s] compensation to relatives of United States citizens who were killed as a result of the bombings of United States Embassies in East Africa on August 7, 1998.

Who could oppose this bill? Who could be unmoved by the tragedy suffered by victims of such terror? Apparently, twelve Republican recidivists, that’s who. I’ll note that even Republican Whip Roy Blunt co-sponsored this bill. Here are his fellow party members whom he could not persuade:

Paul Broun (GA-10), Eric Cantor (VA-07), Nathan Deal (GA-09), Jeff Flake (AZ-06), Virgil Goode (VA-05), Steve LaTourette (OH-14), Ron Paul (TX-14), Bud Shuster (PA-09), Mike Simpson (ID-02), Tom Tancredo (CO-06), Lee Terry (NE-02), & Bill Young (FL-10)

What message are these cruel, cruel men (and they are all men) sending? That government spending must be controlled at all costs, even when we’re talking about barely $10 million total? That when Osama bin Laden attacks our citizens, we can’t be bothered to help them even ten years later? No matter how you prise it apart, this is a terrible and immoral vote.

And, for almost any incumbent, it would also be a political debacle – except that most of this dirty dozen sit in districts so overwhelmingly red that they are practically near-infra. I doubt that Bud Shuster (R+15) is going to be feeling any heat over this one any time soon.

Which is why I single out the decrepit C.W. “Bill” Young of Florida’s 10th Congressional District for special scorn. All of these Republicans should pay a price for their vote, but Young – whose toss-up district tilts just a little bit Dem at D+1 – is by far the most vulnerable. Indeed, Young, age 76, has been the subject of retirement rumors for the better part of a year.

What makes Young’s vote even worse is that two of the victims whose families would be affected by the bill hailed from Florida. Both were members of the military. I hope Young draws a strong opponent this cycle, and I hope whoever that may be doesn’t hesitate to highlight this outrageous vote. This election should serve as a lesson to Bill Young, and to the eleven other shameful Republicans who share his mindset.

(Hat-tip: DemocraticLuntz)

Ah, how the siren song of sixty senate seats serenades us. With “just” nine more seats in the upper chamber, Democrats can, in theory, exercise total control over the legislative agenda. Republicans will no longer be able to obstruct the progress the American people demand. And with a Democrat 1600 Pennsylvania and Nancy Pelosi guiding the People’s House with a firm hand, we will see the dawn of a new golden age for the Blue.

Hey, anything is possible, and nine seats certainly looks a lot more realistic, if still distant, today than it did a year ago. But here’s a new question: Have we just walked right smack into the next Republican talking-point scare tactic? Bob Novak, the Prince of Darkness, might have just tipped his hand in bringing up this tidbit:

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), in his second term running the Senate Democratic campaign, publicly expresses doubt about picking up an additional nine seats to achieve a filibuster-free Senate. But he has been soliciting popular Democratic governors from Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming to run against incumbent Republican Senators from those “red” states – perhaps even to win the magic nine seats. The problem is that these governors do not relish running with Hillary Clinton at the top of the ticket.

At first I thought this was just a way for the Douchebag of Liberty to ding Schumer by setting up absurdly unrealistic expectations, and to perpetuate a largely baseless smear against Clinton. But one of my political mentors suggested that the fear of a filibuster-proof Senate might serve as a baseline defense, the ultimate desperation firewall, a means for the GOP to nationalize the elections in their favor. I think this view may be right.

Indeed, Chuck Schumer is no dummy – he didn’t raise the issue of a sixty-seat Dem majority himself. While liberal bloggers and even Beltway prognosticators have openly discussed this possibility for some time, Schumer only spoke on the topic because the WaPo’s Chris Cillizza broached it in an interview. But Novakula – who often serves as a mouthpiece for the conservative hive mind – looks like he’s trying to make an issue out of this.

On the other hand, Novak is as delusional as often as he is right. It may well be that hyping procedural arcana to stoke Fear of a Blue Planet is a bridge too far even for the GOP. After all, Republican attempts to thwart Democrats last year by invoking the specter of a Pelosi-led House did not seem all that successful. And it’s one thing to pin your hopes on people understanding what majorities mean – start jawing about this sixty-seat silliness and all but the savviest may well tune you out.

In any event, stay alert for this potential talking point. If you see any examples of Republicans flogging this, let us know.