Month: June 2008

Anzalone Liszt for Larry Kissell (6/8-14, likely voters):

Larry Kissell (D): 45

Robin Hayes (R-inc): 43

(MoE: ±4%)

Here’s some more bad news for Robin Hayes: On the generic ballot, Democrats now hold a 49-32 advantage in the district, up from 42-33 in May 2007. Hayes’ re-elects are at 43% against 39% who say they will vote for someone new. What’s more, Barack Obama has a 50-37 lead over John McCain in this R+3 district. With an African-American population of 28%, this is one district in particular where we can expect some serious presidential coattails.

Hayes realizes he’s in danger, as he’s already gone up on the airwaves with ads attacking Kissell over tax issues. This one definitely won’t be the under-the-radar race that it was in 2006.

Public Policy Polling has new numbers for the Senate race this year, and the Governor’s race next year.  

In the Senate race, PPP finds what just about every other poll has found

Fmr. Gov. Mark Warner (D) 59%

Fmr. Gov. Jim Gilmore (R) 28%

The governor’s race is a bit more interesting.  PPP finds that the presumptive Republican nominee has a small lead against the two Democrats vying to win the Democratic nomination

Attorney General Bob McDonnell (R) 32%

State Sen. Creigh Deeds (D) 27%

Attorney General Bob McDonnell (R) 33%

State Del. Brian Moran 27%

While we are down early here, I would like our chances with either nominee.  Deeds lost the 2005 Attorney General’s race to McDonnell by 323 votes.  Moran is the brother of U.S. Rep. Jim Moran.  

While Moran is seen as the early favorite in the Democratic primary, the race could be close.  

Finally, the poll gives Obama a 47-45 lead over McCain in the Commonwealth.

http://www.publicpolicypolling…

Heather Ryan recently fired up Democrats at Kentucky’s Democratic Party Convention. While we had problems with the audio, the video of this speech is now ready.  

Without further delay, here is Heather Ryan at the KDP Convention:

This race is winnable and we have a great Democrat!!!

Please support Heather Ryan and our efforts here:

http://www.actblue.com/page/am…

The DCCC is rolling out their third wave of candidates included in their Red To Blue fundraising program today:

AK-AL: Ethan Berkowitz

AZ-01: Ann Kirkpatrick

AZ-03: Bob Lord

CO-04: Betsy Markey

FL-21: Raul Martinez

FL-25: Joe Garcia

LA-04: Paul Carmouche

MD-01: Frank Kratovil

NM-01: Martin Heinrich

NM-02: Harry Teague

NV-03: Dina Titus

NY-13: Mike McMahon

VA-02: Glenn Nye

VA-11: Gerry Connolly

These additions swell the Red To Blue roster to 37 names, although the additions of Kirkpatrick, Titus, and Heinrich were previously announced. The full roster of Red To Blue candidates is available on the DCCC’s website.

The only mild surprise here for me is Frank Kratovil, who is up against far-right Republican Andy Harris in Maryland’s 1st CD, an R+9.8 district. I knew the DCCC would acknowledge this race as a pick-up opportunity, but I didn’t expect it to happen this soon.

The DCCC is also rolling out a new slate of 20 “Emerging Races”, a sort of “watch list” for future Red To Blue additions. Among them are Jill Derby (NV-02), Nick Leibham (CA-50), and Michael Skelly (TX-07). We’ll post the full list when we can.

UPDATE: Here’s the full list of “emerging races”:

AL-03: Josh Segall

CA-50: Nick Leibham

FL-09: John Dicks

FL-18: Annette Taddeo

IL-06: Jill Morgenthaler

IL-18: Colleen Callahan

IN-03: Mike Montagano

KY-02: David Boswell

MN-02: Steve Sarvi

MN-06: El Tinklenberg

NC-10: Dan Johnson

NJ-05: Dennis Shulman

NV-02: Jill Derby

OH-02: Vic Wulsin

PA-03: Kathy Dahlkemper

PA-06: Bob Roggio

PA-15: Sam Bennett

TX-07: Michael Skelly

VA-05: Tom Perriello

VA-10: Judy Feder

It’s been a few months since we’ve done one of these, so let’s see what we come up with this time around. You know the drill: Rank the senate races (as far down the list as you wish to go) in order of likelihood of flipping.

Have at it!

No, the Senior senator from Montana did not get an invite into the Playboy mansion, or a night on the town with the Pussycat Dolls. Rather, he has the good fortune to be running virtually unopposed along with 4 other Democratic Senators (Biden, Harkin, Pryor, and Reed). Why? Because the Republican Party in the state of Montana has completely lost it, selecting 85 year old Bob Kelleher to be its nominee.

Senate Guru on Tuesday posted a detailed analysis of why Bob Kelleher won the Republican primary on June 3. I just thought I pull a few of my favorite quotes. Obviously, the Republican Party does not find him representative of their views, referring to Kelleher’s proposal to change the U.S style of government into a parliamentary system, plus other issues:

No. Those positions don’t reflect the platform of the Montana Republican Party or the national Republican Party,” he said. “Mr. Kelleher is going to have to go out and make his case to Republicans and all Montana.

But I find this even more amusing. Max Baucus obviously has reasons to be arrogant this cycle, but even this takes the cake. He’s not planning to debate with his opponent at all because:

For one thing, said Barrett Kaiser, a Baucus spokesman, there will be no debates.

“Max plans on talking to Montanans across the state, and they’ll have ample opportunity to ask him questions,” he said. “But we don’t want to subject him to what will become a circus.”

A circus? I think it’s a little late to avoid that scenario, buddy.

One last point, an encouraging quote from Chuck Feney at the comments section:

All this is the legacy of Marc Racicot. Now that we know the damage that he did to this State with the Montana Power – Goldman Sachs swindle, the Republican party in Montana will go the way of the WHIGS.*** Welcome to “Blue Montana” – Denny, you’re next!

So I have two questions to ask before I sign off:

1.) Could this get any worse for the GOP?

2.) Is Montana turning blue?

We went a long way toward swinging the needle in the House to the left in the 2006 election. Obviously, this is a direct result of picking up 30+ seats, but there’s more to it than that. It’s also a matter of replacing Republicans with the right people: replacing a right-wing nutter with a progressive goes a much longer way toward than replacing a moderate Republican with a Blue Dog, and we did more of the former. In addition, most of our open seat replacements wound up being more liberal than their predecessors.

To explore this, I matched up the DW-Nominate score* for each representative in each seat in the 109th Congress (2005-2006) vs. the 110th Congress (2007-2008). (I also converted the scores into discrete ranks from most liberal to least liberal, as DW-Nominate scores don’t look very meaningful at first glance. However, I’m subtracting the scores, not the ranks, so that we’re measuring actual shifts in voting records, rather than measuring distortion caused by an increase in the size of the Democratic caucus.) Let’s start by looking at the seats where the overall shift was the largest (not coincidentally, these were the seats that switched from R to D).

District	109th Rep.	109th Score	Rank	110th Rep.	110th Score	Rank	Difference
MN-01	Gutknecht (R)	0.747	414	Walz (D)	-0.337	161	-1.084
CO-07	Beauprez (R)	0.631	378	Perlmutter (D)	-0.317	173	-0.948
WI-08	Green (R)	0.561	353.5	Kagen (D)	-0.333	165	-0.894
KS-02	Ryun (R)	0.637	383	Boyda (D)	-0.239	197	-0.876
NH-02	Bass (R)	0.479	302.5	Hodes (D)	-0.397	126	-0.876
IN-08	Hostettler (R)	0.753	415	Ellsworth (D)	-0.118	229	-0.871
NH-01	Bradley (R)	0.467	298	Shea-Porter (D)	-0.398	124	-0.865
TX-23	Bonilla (R)	0.482	305.5	Rodriguez (D)	-0.362	147.5	-0.844
AZ-05	Hayworth (R)	0.688	399	Mitchell (D)	-0.148	224	-0.836
KY-03	Northup (R)	0.431	279.5	Yarmuth (D)	-0.401	122	-0.832

More over the flip…

In case you’re wondering which GOP to Dem switch made the least difference, the answer may surprise you: it was in PA-08, which was one of the few cases where we went from a moderate Republican (Fitzpatrick: 0.213 (207)) to a Blue Dog (Murphy: – 0.233 (200)). (Patrick Murphy gets a lot of netroots credit for his anti-war stance, but he’s pretty economically conservative.)

Now let’s look at seats where the leftward shift was the greatest but where the same party kept the seat (and in some cases, the same person kept the seat).

District	109th Rep.	109th Score	Rank	110th Rep.	110th Score	Rank	Difference
HI-02	Case (D)	-0.222	184	Hirono (D)	-0.57	40.5	-0.348
TX-04	Hall (R)	0.453	287.5	Hall (R)	0.249	237	-0.204
FL-11	Davis (D)	-0.292	166.5	Castor (D)	-0.459	88	-0.167
FL-13	Harris (R)	0.561	353.5	Buchanan (R)	0.447	294	-0.114
TN-09	Ford (D)	-0.322	155	Cohen (D)	-0.432	106.5	-0.11
MD-03	Cardin (D)	-0.352	142	Sarbanes (D)	-0.46	87	-0.108
MN-05	Sabo (D)	-0.583	31	Ellison (D)	-0.674	15	-0.091
NV-02	Gibbons (R)	0.641	386.5	Heller (R)	0.561	355.5	-0.08
OH-10	Kucinich (D)	-0.727	7	Kucinich (D)	-0.795	2	-0.068
OK-05	Istook (R)	0.601	365	Fallin (R)	0.537	340	-0.064

I’m not really sure what overcame Ralph Hall. He switched to the Republicans in 2004 in order to survive the DeLay-mander, so my best guess is that he may have been overcompensating in 2005 and 2006 in order to prove his Republican bona fides and avoid a primary challenge, but now that he’s more safely ensconced in his seat, he’s reverting more toward his original Blue Doggish tendencies.

Finally, let’s look at the seats where there was the greatest rightward shift. If you look at the raw numbers, you might think the House as a whole moved to the right: there was a leftward progression in 149 seats and a rightward movement in 154 seats (with the score staying exactly the same in the other 132 seats). However, most of those rightward shifts are extremely small fractions, perhaps as the remaining Republicans closed ranks; a few bigger shifts resulted from open seats (both D and R-held). None of the shifts is anywhere near the magnitude of what occurred in seats that went from R to D.

District	109th Rep.	109th Score	Rank	110th Rep.	110th Score	Rank	Difference
OH-04	Oxley (R)	0.434	281.5	Jordan (R)	0.772	417	0.338
MI-07	Schwarz (R)	0.317	229	Walberg (R)	0.623	374.5	0.306
GA-09/10	Norwood (R)	0.711	405	Broun (R)	0.998	433	0.287
NE-03	Osborne (R)	0.362	243.5	Smith (R)	0.627	376	0.265
CA-22	Thomas (R)	0.399	261	McCarthy (R)	0.573	358	0.174
OH-06	Strickland (D)	-0.461	84	Wilson (D)	-0.289	181	0.172
TN-01	Jenkins (R)	0.548	344	Davis (R)	0.684	393.5	0.136
IL-06	Hyde (R)	0.419	271.5	Roskam (R)	0.538	341	0.119
GA-04	McKinney (D)	-0.641	17	Johnson (D)	-0.527	54	0.114
IL-17	Evans (D)	-0.47	79	Hare (D)	-0.366	146	0.104

* I’m using DW-Nominate 1st dimension scores for this because, of all the methods for assessing voting records, it’s the best for doing linear, historical research where one Congress is compared against another. DW-Nominate scores reflect all votes on all roll calls, so there isn’t the cherry-picking problem that other aggregators run into. In some ways, I’d prefer to be using Progressive Punch or National Journal scores, as I’ve done on previous projects; they’re scored 100 to 0, and people can easily mentally convert them into the A-to-F grading scale. However, in addition to the distortion problems that come with those methods, there’s the matter of older National Journal and CQ scores being behind paid firewalls, and the matter of older Progressive Punch scores being available only as lifetime scores rather than being broken down by year or congress.

Here is their explanation of how the scores work; for those of you who aren’t professional statisticians, what you need to know is that the scores basically run between – 1 and 1, with – 1 being most liberal and 1 being most conservative. My eventual goal is to build a database that examines the relationship between DW-Nominate scores and PVIs over the decades, but, please, give me some time on that.

Rasmussen (6/16, likely voters, 5/14 in parens):

Mark Begich (D): 44 (47)

Ted Stevens (R-inc): 46 (45)

(MoE: ±4%)

Ted Stevens is going to be a tough son of a bitch to beat (much tougher than Don Young), but he begins the Senate race in serious peril against Mark Begich.

Bonus finding: If you look at the crosstabs, Rasmussen also lists which Senate candidate the supporters of the presidential candidates also favor. Obama supporters go with Begich 75-17, while McCain supporters go with Stevens by an almost identical 75-18. Unsurprisingly, if you multiply these numbers out by the Senate candidates’ share of the vote (and also include “undecided” and “other”), McCain noses Obama by barely 43-41.

UPDATE: Hm, I guess our math was off a tiny bit. Rasmussen has released their Presidential crosstabs, and McCain leads Obama by 45-41 in Alaska. Still a phenomenal performance for a Democrat in this supposedly solid red state.

SSP currently rates this race as Leans Republican.

SurveyUSA (6/13-16, likely voters):

Bruce Lunsford (D): 46

Mitch McConnell (R-inc): 50

(MoE: ±4%)

This is the second poll we’ve seen showing McConnell in trouble. A Rasmussen Reports survey from last month showed Lunsford actually leading McConnell by four points. McConnell’s campaign subsequently released an internal poll showing him leading Lunsford by 50-39, which wasn’t exactly a spectacular performance itself. If McConnell’s ceiling is around the 50% mark, this could actually be a real race.

Bonus finding: McCain only leads Obama by 53-41 in the same round of polling. This is SUSA’s first poll since the Democratic presidential primary concluded.