Month: October 2008

SurveyUSA (10/26-27, likely voters, 10/6-7 in parens):

Ashwin Madia (D): 44 (46)

Erik Paulsen (R-inc): 45 (43)

Other: 9 (n/a)

(MoE: ±3.9%)

Paulsen takes the slimmest of leads in SurveyUSA’s latest Minnesota poll. This seems to run counter to the general sense that Madia has been pulling away from Paulsen in recent days. Of course, like a lot of SUSA polls from Minnesota, there are weird things at work in the crosstabs. For instance, Paulsen takes a 44-41 lead among 18 to 34 year-olds (a group where Madia had held a 52-42 lead earlier in the month).

It seems that the kids just can’t get enough of the GOP in Minnesota — the kids who are square enough to answer their landline and talk to a robot pollster, at least.

SUSA has produced some pretty favorable polls for Republicans this year in Minnesota in both the Presidential and Senate contests, so I’ll take this one with a grain of salt.

SurveyUSA (10/26-27, likely voters, 10/12-13 in parentheses):

Chris Gregoire (D-inc): 50 (48)

Dino Rossi (Prefers GOP Party): 48 (47)

(MoE: ±4%)

Yesterday I commented, in relation to the UW poll that gave Chris Gregoire a 6-point edge, that national pollsters insist on seeing this as a 1-2 point game, but local pollsters see a wider spread. Well, like clockwork, SurveyUSA rolled in today with a 50-48 spread (in fact, the third time they’ve come up with a 50-48 tally).

This poll is interesting for one reason, though: SurveyUSA this time asked the ‘already voted’ question. 54% of the respondents have already voted, and of them, they’re going for Gregoire at a 53-46 ratio (with 1% undecided!). The remaining likely voters are breaking for Rossi 50-47, but as you can see from the topline, there just aren’t enough of them to win it for him. One other crosstab that I found nice to see: self-described moderates go for Gregoire 57-42, meaning they aren’t buying Rossi’s innocuous sales patter. (Obama is destroying McCan’t upticket, 56-39.)

The Donald:

Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), who is also under investigation by federal officials, offered a whole-hearted, but odd endorsement of Stevens, equating his pursuit of justice with that of disgraced former President Richard Nixon.

“I can remember Richard Nixon, you know, his years of service, what he’s done, and everybody [was] ridiculing him, and he ended up being the greatest president in the history of our century. … The Senator will be re-elected. He will appeal it. When he does go, he will win it because there’s no way this is a jury of his peers,” Young told the Anchorage Daily News.

No further comment required.

Lycoming College (10/19-23, likely voters, 9/21-25 in parentheses):

Chris Carney (D-inc): 50 (46)

Chris Hackett (R): 35 (36)

(MoE: ±4.7%)

Holding a seat in an R+8 district that we picked up mostly because the incumbent was accused of choking his mistress shouldn’t be this easy. Chris Carney pushes his lead in this race to 15 points, up from 10 in last month’s Lycoming poll.

In fact, with the exception of a SurveyUSA poll in August that had the race within 4, nobody has seen this as a close race. We might not be so lucky in 2010 in terms of having the wind at our backs, but if Carney can hold on until 2012, he can probably be rewarded with a much safer district (like the older configuration of the 10th, which contained Dem-heavy Scranton).

So the guy who was recruited to run against Jim Gerlach last year, who got the DCCC’s blessing and was recruited by Bob Brady and was reported in this blog I think, wrote a very long and exceedingly interesting article on why he dropped out.  This guy could realistically have been elected next week if he’d stayed in, but he wasn’t willing to become and remain a completely different kind of person in order to be in Congress.  His story about what he liked about campaigning and also about what he wasn’t able to do is pretty amazing.  There aren’t many first-hand accounts like this from people who really could have won.

Seeing as how a lot of the younger people here have explicitly talked about wanting to run for Congress, and since we’re the kind of people who knew that Larry Platt was running the day PolitickerPA scooped it, and knew he’d dropped out the day he told Van Hollen, it’s a good read for this community I think.

As a teaser, here’s the section where Rep Bob Brady approaches Platt for the first time:

After the speech, Congressman Bob Brady sidled up to me. Brady is the last of the big-city bosses. Head of the Democratic Party in Philadelphia, Brady was a carpenter who rose to power in the carpenters’ union. He’s six feet, 250 pounds, with the square jaw of a street tough, and he makes no bones about believing in the smoke-filled backroom deal. In the magazine, we’d railed against Brady’s antiquated, old-school views; we’d championed reform and transparency.

Still, I couldn’t help but love the guy. In politics the rogues are always more interesting than the goo-goos-the good-government types. Brady’s word was his bond, and he couldn’t help but be honest about his crass manipulations. “I’ve never done anything illegal in this job,” he confided to me once, years ago. “But you do do things that are wrong.”

It was in that conversation that I shared with him my nascent, almost flip desire to maybe “run for something someday.” Maybe something like Congress. Now here it was, a couple of years after that conversation, and Brady hadn’t forgotten.

He approached me with a self-conscious grin. “I know you kick the shit out of me in your magazine,” he said. “But you should think about running for Congress in the Sixth.”

“I live in the Sixth,” I said. “I grew up in the Sixth.”

Brady’s eyes widened. “Would you take a call about it?” he asked.

And the link to GQ (the whole blog is good, by the way).

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Insider Advantage (10/27, likely voters, 10/23 in parens):

Jim Martin (D): 44 (42)

Saxby Chambliss (R-inc): 46 (44)

Other: 2 (2)

(MoE: ±3.8%)

Say what you will about this race, it’s consistent. While nobody has shown an actual lead for Jim Martin, almost every poll in the last few weeks has shown him 2 points back, or thereabouts.

With such a close race, and with Libertarian Allen Buckley consistently gobbling up a few points, it’s starting to look likelier and likelier that Chambliss will fall slightly shy of the 50% mark. With Lunsford a few points short and Musgrove starting to dwindle, it’s looking like the question of whether or not we break 60 seats may well turn on a December runoff election in Georgia.

Research 2000 for Daily Kos (10/20-22, likely voters):

Raul Martinez (D): 44

Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-inc): 45

(MoE: ±5%)

Research 2000 for Daily Kos (10/20-22, likely voters, 9/23-25 in parentheses):

Joe Garcia (D): 43 (41)

Mario Diaz-Balart (R-inc): 46 (45)

(MoE: ±5%)

Two last stragglers from this weekend’s poll blitz to discuss: both the South Florida races involving the Diaz-Balart brothers are almost neck-and-neck as we near the finish line. They’re similar districts (the 21st is R+6, the 25th is R+4, both are more than 60% Hispanic, most of which is Cuban-American), obviously similar incumbents (Mario is the slightly more conservative one), and the challengers are similarly close.

Raul Martinez, the former mayor of Hialeah (the population center of the 21st), is trailing Lincoln Diaz-Balart by one point. Among the 17% who’ve voted already, Martinez leads 55-42. While it’s not surprising that the locally well-known Martinez is performing well in this one-time reliable GOP stronghold, it is very surprising that Obama is leading in this district 50-45 (and 55-42 among early voters). (Although given dramatic changes in registration numbers, maybe not that surprising.)

In the 25th, a district which is further out in the suburbs (and includes a whole lot of empty territory in the Everglades), Joe Garcia is back by 3, a slightly closer race than one month ago, and is leading among independents 42-41 (much better than the 4-point deficit among indies last month). Of the 12% who’ve voted already, Garcia leads 52-46.

Perhaps the timing of this diary is irregular considering we want to see as many Democrats as possible elected next week, but my own selection is connected to the current state of the electoral battleground in a sense.  There are a number of strong contenders particularly in the House, and perhaps Tim Mahoney is currently the most obvious choice, at least for his brief remaining tenure in the House.  Those with the stench of corruption encircling them, such as William Jefferson or even John Murtha, would also be worthy selections.  Jim Marshall seems to be against the Dems on virtually ever major issue so I’m sure he’d get some votes.  But after the final clincher this spring, I offer the dubious honor to Dan Boren of Oklahoma….

Boren has always essentially been Lieberman on steroids in terms of bad-mouthing the Democratic Party, making several cringeworthy quotes about his party’s “out-of-touch leadership” going way back to his first election in 2004.  And of course he votes against us on essentially every major issue.  But I was most disgusted with him last spring after the primaries ended when Boren publicly declared he would not cast his superdelegate for Barack Obama, twisting the knife in the chest of an already divided party and making a destructive spectacle out of a vote that would have been uncontroversial.

One could almost understand if Jim Marshall had done this because Marshall is in a hotly contested district.  But Boren would not have lost his Congressional seat by keeping his mouth shut and casting his superdelegate for his party’s nominee….or even casting the superdelegate for Hillary in silence.  Instead, Boren stuck it to Obama and gave comfort to every Oklahoman with doubts about Obama.

I realize Boren won’t be going away and that a conservative Democrat is the only kind that can hold this seat, but I would love to see Brad Carson take this seat back.  At least he didn’t go out of his way to trash his party, and when pressed by Tim Russert back in 2004 on who he planned to vote for, said without hesitancy that he planned to vote for his party’s nominee.