(Bumped – promoted by DavidNYC)
To shove the AllSpark into Optimus Prime’s chest? To perform the vital task of compiling everyone’s Senate predictions into one combined ranking? May the hardy among you fire up your spreadsheets and post the results in comments!
Wouldn’t it be delicious if the GOP had to defend yet another Senate seat next year, should David Vitter resign? Oh, and, trivia question: There are already going to be two Senate elections in Wyoming in 2008, and there might be two in Louisiana. When was the last time that two states held two Senate contests in the same year?
In other site news, we also hope to have DailyKos-style AJAX comments coming to the site in the near future. For a preview of what this will be like, check out our friends at the recently re-designed Blue Jersey.
I believe in elections, and elections believe in me.
We here at the SSP hope everyone has a great Fourth of July holiday. We’ll be taking a vacation through the end of the week, so in the meantime, feel free to use this as an open thread.
See you next week!
The end of the fundraising quarter is this Saturday, June 30th. I know I don’t need to remind Swing State Project readers about how important these deadlines are. But I do want to raise an issue that we didn’t face last cycle – the presidential campaign.
Each passing quarter, more and more media oxygen will get devoted to the presidentials. This quarter may be the last before the political press gets totally devoured by the race for the White House. So I strongly encourage donating to the Democrat (or Democrats) of your choice this week.
If you’re looking for some worthy candidates, you can check out Charlie Brown and Donna Edwards on the Blue Majority fundraising page (formerly the “netroots” page). But there are tons of great people out there. Find someone you like and give a little.
And in comments, if you’re making a donation or thinking about doing so, please tell us who your target might be.
The folks over at Tondee’s Tavern are saying that Democrat James Marlow has conceded the race for Georgia’s 10th Congressional District. But if you look at the statement they actually link to, Marlow doesn’t quite do that. Rather, he says:
We will watch as the final official returns come in, and once all of the votes are in, we will make an assessment about whether further action is appropriate.
That’s because state law permits Marlow – who trails Republican Paul Broun by 187 votes in the official count – to seek a recount so long as the margin separating the two is less than 1%. Right now it’s 0.4%, but that number is only likely to increase, given that the few outstanding precincts are almost all in counties which favored Broun. And no matter what the final tally, there’s no reason to believe a recount could make up the difference.
Ultimately, this is a pretty frustrating outcome, given that two other lesser-known Democrats in the race took 8% between them – more than enough to have put Marlow comfortably in second place. Then again, an overall Dem performance of 28.3% is pretty appalling, given that even John Kerry managed to take 35% in this district. (Of course, in a low-turnout special election, this isn’t much of a surprise.) So even if Marlow were to advance to the run-off, it’s difficult to envision any way in which he could win. Repeating that Hackett magic is hard.
A state appellate court ruled Monday that Christine Jennings has no right to examine the programming source code that runs the electronic voting machines she says malfunctioned in her southwest Florida congressional race.The three-judge panel said Monday Jennings did not meet the “extraordinary burden” of proving a lower court was wrong to deny her request last December.
Jennings already had shifted focus to a congressional task force assigned to sort out her election dispute with Republican Vern Buchanan, the state-certified winner of the race by only 369 votes. A spokesman said she has no immediate plans to appeal Monday’s ruling.
Don’t worry, sports fans – this is hardly the end of the game:
“I think the only important activity right now is what is going on in Congress, since they have the ultimate authority in this matter,” Jennings’ spokesman David Kochman said. “They are also moving quicker than the court ever has. In terms of access to the source code and machines, the task force made it clear last week that won’t be a hurdle. They have subpoena power.”
Exactly right. What has taken the glacial Florida courts half a year to decide not to do, Congress can (and likely will) do in an afternoon. While it would have been nice if the courts, rather than Congress, wound up granting access to the ES&S source code, Republicans would have cried “politics” no matter what. And like the spokesman says, now that the legal proceedings are essentially moot, things can move a lot faster.
This has the potential to be really fascinating – our first-ever true window into the “black box” of voting machine source code. Congress’s experts will be able to look at the actual guts of what animates ES&S’s electronic ballot boxes. Even if the eventual findings don’t prove favorable to Jennings’ specific case, we’ll have a chance to know once and for all whether the voting machine companies’ claims that their products are secure and accurate are for real.
Despite everything, we’re still a democracy and we still have elections. Which ones are you thinking about?
From Rasmussen (likely voters, no trendlines):
Beshear (D): 51
Fletcher (R-inc.): 35
Other: 8
Undecided: 6
(MoE: ±4.5%)
This poll comes on the heels of a SUSA survey which showed Beshear with an even larger lead. It’s a little hard to know what to believe, except for one thing: Fletcher is in the doghouse, and he’d have to pull off a miracle to come out of it. Then again, I figured for sure Northup would clobber him. Can lightning strike twice for Ernie? I doubt it, but I’m done saying “never” in this business.
P.S. Mark Nickolas has some more thoughts here. Amusingly, he also takes the Sean Connery pledge to never say never.
(Hat-tip: Taegan Goddard.)
After Peter DeFazio announced his decision not to run for the Senate, the race became an unavoidable topic. I said I would look at it and consider whether a candidacy made sense for me and my family. At this time, it does not, and I have decided not to run for the US Senate.…
The difficulty in even doing the ground work to evaluate the race was that I have an important, all consuming day job. After years of working in the minority, fighting the Bush administration and Tom DeLay to stop reckless policies and promote Oregon priorities, the world has dramatically changed.
My issues, from ending the Iraq war to stopping global warming, to making sure everyone has health care they can afford, a quality education, and a good job, have gained not just attention, but traction and even momentum. My committee assignments put me in the best possible position to deal with these priorities everyday. I’ve been working for over a decade to get on the Ways and Means Committee and to regain a Democratic majority. I say with January both of these dreams become a reality. Speaker Nancy Pelosi also chose me to serve on the new Global Warming and Energy Independence Committee.
At this unique moment in history there is too much work to be done in the House of Representatives to take on a campaign for the US Senate.
As you can see, giving up a seat in the majority caucus in the House is tough indeed. All the more reason to be impressed with Mark Udall’s and Tom Allen’s decision to seek higher office. But they may be the only sitting Congressmen to do so this cycle. Chuck Schumer will likely have to look elsewhere for his top-tier recruits. However, I’m not all that worried – last cycle, only one of our top Senate candidates* was a member of the House. I think we’ll be able to find plenty of good office-seekers from other quarters this time, too.
* Who challenged an incumbent – Sherrod Brown. Brownsox reminds us about Ben Cardin, Bernie Sanders and Harold Ford.