Month: November 2008

So, who wins what prizes this year?  Feel free to suggest other prizes or candidates for any prize!

Nominees below the fold.

Most Interesting Name:

Barack Obama (D-Pres)

Theodore Terbolizard (R-CA-04)

Pro-Life (R-ID-Sen)

Charlie Brown (D-CA-04)

Carl Mumpower (R-NC-11)

Elwyn Tinklenberg (D-MN-06)

(and Bill Sally?)

Most undeserving win:

Michelle Bachmann (R-MN-06)

Don Young (R-AK-AL)

Aaron Schock (R-IL-18)

Dollar Bill (D-LA-02)

Mean Jean (R-OH-02)

Most undeserving loss:

Nick Lampson (D-TX-22)

Nancy Boyda (D-KS-02)

Don Cazayoux (D-LA-06)

Most deserving loss:

Andy Harris (R-MD-01)

Tim Mahoney ( D WTF-FL-16)

Robin Hayes (R-NC-08)

Randy Kuhl (R-NY-29)

Virgil Goode (R-VA-05)

Tom Feeney (R-FL-24)

Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO-04)

Best campaign:

Walt Minnick (D-ID-01)

Barack Obama & Joe Biden (D-Pres & VP)

Tom Perriello (D-VA-05)

Harry Teague (D-NM-02)

Alan Grayson (D-FL-08)

Jeff Merkley (D-OR-Sen)

Kay Hagan (D-NC-Sen)

Travis Childers (D-MS-01)

Worst campaign:

Bill Sali (R-ID-01)

Paul Kanjorski (D-PA-11) (but he won, so maybe he shouldn’t be here)

Mike Arcuri (D-NY-24) (well, he won anyway, but with a very underwhelming win)

Mary Jo Kilroy (D-OH-15)

David Boswell (D-KY-02)

Linda Stender (D-NJ-07)

Kay Barnes (D-MO-06)

John McCain (R-Pres)

Rudy Giuliani (R-Pres)

Fred Thompson (R-Pres)

Bob Straniere (R-NY-13)

Carl Mumpower (R-NC-11) (YOU CAN’T STOP THE MUMPOWER)

“What happened to the” Liddy Dole “I knew?” (R-NC-Sen)

Stupidest event on the D side:

Michael “Bad” Jackson

Mahoney’s getting sucked into the FL-16 sex scandal swamp (or his sheer existence, after retroactively failing the ChadInFL Jim Webb Smell Test)

John Edwards’s also getting sucked into a sex scandal swamp

John Murtha’s rednecks comment

Mark Penn ignores caucuses

Boyda rejects the D-trip

Hillary attacks liberal elitism

Jon Powers vs. Jack Davis

Stupidest event on the R side:

McCain’s choice of running mate

the Club for Shrinkage primarying Wayne Gilchrest

NY-13 (enough said)

McCain’s suspended campaign (yea, right)

Dole’s “Godless” ad

Jim Gilmore’s convention

Bill Sali (he’s his own event)

Joe the Plumber debacle

Giuliani skips the early primaries

Wilson vs. Pearce (NM-Sen)

Cheney endorses McCain

Big Bad John Cornyn (granted, though, he didn’t lose)

Best-looking men:

Martin Heinrich (D-NM-01)

Mark Warner (D-VA-Sen)

Aaron Schock (R-IL-18)

Scott Kleeb (D-NE-Sen)

Patrick Murphy (D-PA-08)

Jon Powers (D-??)

Best-looking women:

Gabby Giffords (D-AZ-08)

Sarah Palin (R-VP)

Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY-20)

Debbie Cook (D-CA-46)

Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin (D-SD-AL)

Closest federal race: well, this still has yet to be decided.  But it looks like MN-Sen, OH-15, or CA-04 might win that prize, with VA-05 having an outside chance.  (“Landslide Joe” Courtney won by a real landslide this time.)

Our daily series of 2010 threads continues, and today the SSP Recruitment Express is running at full steam through the Golden State.

Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is term-limited, meaning that many, many Democrats are salivating over the opportunity to take back the Governor’s mansion in California. There are a lot of potential names out there for Democrats (including Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, who has already announced his candidacy), but who would you like to see reach for the ring? And for the Republicans, Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner seems to be their likeliest candidate, but will more names join the fray? (Paging Tom McClintock…)

On the Senate side, will Schwarzenegger actually challenge Barbara Boxer? It seems a bit unlikely to me at this point, but I guess you never know. If not, will any Republicans of note step forward (and I’m not sure if this guy really counts)?

And here’s an interesting wrinkle. One of the rumored candidates for the gubernatorial election is none other than Diane Feinstein. Assuming she ran and won, she would be in the rare position of appointing her own replacement in the Senate. If such a scenario actually happens, whom would you like to see Feinstein appoint? There are a lot of choices on California’s bench out there.

There will be 16 democratic held seats up in 2010. I’ll take a look at which of these seats I consider to have the potential to be competitive.

Before I start, I’ll just add that I’m going to be small c, conservative with this analysis. Many of the races that I put in the competitive category will probably not be competitive on election day, but that looking 2 years ahead I have absolutely no idea what will happen.

Not competitive races: Even 2 years ahead of time, I think I can safely predict that barring something unusual I don’t expect a race in these states.

1. Arkansas(Blanche Lincoln)-Huckabee is not running.

2. California(Barbara Boxer)-You think Arnold’s ego will allow him to be one of 100, and a powerless backbencher at that? PLEASE.

3. Indiana(Evan Bayh)

4. Maryland(Barbara Mikulski)

5. New York(Charles Schumer)

6. North Dakota(Byron Dorgan)-Hoeven’s passed on a race twice, no reason to believe it won’t be a third.

7. Oregon(Ron Wyden)

8. Vermont(Patrick Leahy)

9. Washington(Patty Murray)-I think 2-time loser Dino Rossi is probably too tainted by now.

Now, I’ll look at the 7 states I think could be competitive.

1. Colorado(Ken Salazar)-Things are looking real good for Salazar, but if former Gov. Bill Owens decides to return to politics, who knows.

2. Connecticut(Chris Dodd)-I don’t expect this race to be competitive. But, Dodd does have pretty mediocre approval ratings and if Chris Shays decided to run Dodd could be in for a race.

3. Hawaii(Daniel Inouye)-He runs again, he wins. But, he’ll be 86 on election day. And if he chooses to retire, the Dem will be a favorite but Gov. Lingle could give us some heartburn.

4. Illinois(TBD)-Whomever is appointed will be a heavy favorite but until we know exactly who that is, its impossible to know how this will play out.

5. Delware(TBD)-This is even more complicated than Illinois since there’s the possiblity of a place holder so Beau can run in the 2010 election. But judging by the DE GOP’s inability to field a credible candidate for the 08 Governor’s race doesn’t bode well for them here.

6. Nevada(Harry Reid)-I know a lot of people have looked at this race as potentially very competitive, but I just don’t see it. But, I have little doubt that whomever is running the NRSC will be trying hard to recruit a top-tier candidate here.

7. Wisconsin-I don’t expect this race to be competitive either. But if Scott Walker or Paul Ryan decide to run, this could turn into a very tight race.

Zoom, zoom, zoom!

Mark Begich made a dramatic comeback Wednesday to overtake Ted Stevens for the lead in Alaska’s U.S. Senate race.

Late Wednesday night, Begich led Stevens by 814 votes — 132,196 to 131,382 — with the state still to count roughly 35,000 more ballots over the next week.

The state Division of Elections tallied about 60,000 absentee, early and questioned ballots on Wednesday. The ballots broke heavily in Begich’s favor, erasing the 3,000-vote lead that Stevens had after election night last Tuesday.

That leaves an additional 20,000 absentee ballots and 15,000 questioned ballots to be scrutinized and counted. The Anchorage Daily News gives us a timeframe:

The regional election districts centered in the Mat-Su Valley, Nome and Fairbanks will count their remaining ballots Friday. The Southcentral regional election district, based in Anchorage, plans to count ballots between Monday and Wednesday.

As you can see from ADN’s results map, in the results tallied so far, the Mat-Su Valley went strongly for Stevens, while Nome went about as strongly for Begich. Fairbanks was a bit of a wash, and both candidates have different pockets of support in Southcentral. Overall, though, our friends at 538 feel good about the numbers so far. I’m optimistic, too.

Update: ADN has revised the quoted section above to the following:

Most regional elections headquarters will count their remaining ballots on Friday. But the most populous region, based in Anchorage, won’t count its ballots until either Monday or Wednesday, state elections chief Gail Fenumiai said.

So I’m a little unclear as to where exactly these remaining votes are coming from, although the article states that the Nome-based election district (northern and western Alaska, where Begich romped) has yet to count any of its absentee ballots at all.

One More Update: The AP still hasn’t declared a winner in the state’s at-large House race, but the odds of Don Young losing seem slim to none. After today’s flood of new votes, The Donald currently sits on a 15,000-vote lead. That number didn’t budge much from Young’s earlier 17K lead. So, if there are indeed 35,000 absentee and questioned ballots left to be counted, Berkowitz would have to win a bit over 70% of those outstanding votes (assuming that all those questioned ballots are counted — which isn’t going to happen). Given the relatively minimal movement in Berkowitz’s favor compared to Begich’s pickup, is this at all possible? I very much doubt it. Perhaps there are even more absentee or provisional ballots floating around that could bump that number up, but even still, it’s hard to see a path for a Berkowitz miracle here.

Nail-in-the-Coffin Update: The AP calls the race for Young. (H/T: Progressive America)

A Republican state senator will take over.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll, 78, the first woman elected to that office in Pennsylvania history, died today after a battle with a rare form of cancer…

She will be replaced as lieutenant governor by Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati (R., Jefferson).

Drew Crompton, a spokesman for Scarnati, said a decision about a swearing-in ceremony will be made tomorrow. He said Scarnati will retain the role as president pro tempore as his predecessor Robert Jubelirer did in 2001 when Lt. Gov. Mark Schweiker became governor after Gov. Tom Ridge left to become Homeland Security director.

The Center for Responsive Politics has an extremely interesting post today about how many victors in congressional races outspent the losers. The answer, in case you didn’t guess, is almost all of them (93% in the House).

There were 28 House races where the candidate who spent less money still won the race. (This appears to discount the role of third party expenditures, as you’ll see in the case of LA-06, where the role of Cassidy was to spend little while outside parties poured in the cash. Perhaps a project for a future day will be to add IEs to these numbers and re-order them.) All of the races you will recognize from our competitive House Ratings list. If you want to see the list in its entirety, please click through to their story… but I thought I’d add a wrinkle and rate the races not according to how much was spent but according to the winner/loser ratio. In other words, which victorious candidates won most efficiently? Here are the top 10:

District	Winner	$$$	Loser	$$$	Ratio
GA-13	Scott (D)	$842K	Honeycutt (R)	$4,406K	19.1%
LA-06	Cassidy (R)	$620K	Cazayoux (D)	$2,279K	27.2%
PA-03	Dahlkemper (D)	$712K	English (R)	$1,905K	37.4%
FL-16	Rooney (R)	$1,021K	Mahoney (D)	$2,418K	42.2%
SC-01	Brown (R)	$702K	Ketner (D)	$1,641K	42.8%
NC-08	Kissell (D)	$1,100K	Hayes (R)	$2,509K	43.8%
AL-02	Bright (D)	$850K	Love (R)	$1,929K	44.1%
OR-05	Schrader (D)	$1,030K	Erickson (R)	$2,308K	44.7%
NJ-07	Lance (R)	$942K	Stender (D)	$2,092K	45.0%
VA-02	Nye (D)	$733K	Drake (R)	$1,372K	53.4%

In the Senate, there were only two races where the more frugal candidate won: North Carolina and New Hampshire. New Hampshire was very close (99%), but Kay Hagan won this one on the cheap: $6,014K to Dole’s $15,716K, or 38% (although, again, you should factor in the millions dumped into NC by the DSCC).

One other lesson from this story: self-funding doesn’t work. 49 Congressional candidates spend $500,000 of their own money, and of them, only 6 House candidates and 1 Senate candidate won. Perhaps the saddest case of this was Sandy Treadwell, who ran against Kirsten Gillibrand in NY-20. Treadwell poured in at least $5.9 million of his own money. (Gillibrand spent $3.6 million, but only $250 of that was her own money.) The return on Treadwell’s investment: priceless. If by ‘priceless,’ you mean losing to Gillibrand by a 23-point margin.

A few minutes ago, the state of the race was as follows:

Stevens (R): 118,602

Begich (D): 117,631

And now?

Stevens (R): 125,016

Begich (D): 125,019

That still leaves some more ballots to be counted today, but this trend is excellent.

Up-to-the-minute updates are available here.

Great news:

It’s just getting started, but early results from this afternoon’s ballot counting in the contest for U.S. Senate show Mark Begich gaining ground against incumbent Sen. Ted Stevens.

The elections division still has tens of thousands of ballots left to count today and even more next week, but the latest numbers show Stevens’ lead is down to 971 votes.

The new numbers, reflecting nearly 28,000 newly counted absentee ballots, are from all over the state. Election night, Stevens led the Democratic Begich by about 3,000 votes.

Before this latest batch of counted ballots, Stevens has leading by 3257 votes, so this is some excellent movement.

Altogether, the state is counting 60,000 absentee or questioned ballots today — so there’s a lot of room left for Begich to grow his vote count. On top of that, there are an additional 35,000 votes that the Alaska Department of Elections will be counting over the next week. More updates as we get ’em…

Update: For up-to-the-minute results, check here.

Update II: Friend of SSP Nate Silver says that the outstanding districts that won’t post finalized counts today are Begich-friendly rural areas. (Indeed, if you take a look at the map, Begich did quite well in most of the state’s rural areas.)

Update III: Begich takes the lead — by a margin of three votes!

There’s already been a lot of analysis of the evolving political trends from 2004 to 2008 (including from me, although still nothing beats that widely-circulated New York Times county-change map) based on preliminary election returns. But with the exception of dreaminonempty‘s remarkable and must-see map diary over at Open Left, no one has really focused much on what longer-term trends look like, especially at the county-by-county level.

One question I was left with after this election was what areas have changed so much that they used to stick with the Democrats (or Republicans) even in their absolute darkest hour, but now favor Republicans (or Democrats). The darkest hour for Democrats was a pretty easy choice (Walter Mondale); for Republicans, I was initially thinking of Barry Goldwater, but his pre-Civil Rights Act map is just too different from today’s map to be useful, so I settled for the GOP’s second biggest recent failure, Bob Dole.

As I suspected, Mondale/McCain counties were clustered mostly in the same Appalachian swath where Obama underperformed the most at the statewide level; much of this transition is very recent, as a number of these counties (especially eastern Kentucky and western Pennsylvania) even went for Kerry. There were also some southern counties that are around 50/50 white/black, where enough white voters used to be yellow-dog Dixiecrats to put even Mondale barely over the edge, but collapses in white rural southern voting for Dems at the presidential level has allowed Republicans to take those counties more recently.

To my surprise, there were actually more Mondale/McCain counties than there were Dole/Obama counties. (In case any righties are trolling this article looking for some scraps of solace, there’s your takeaway: OBAMA UNDERPERFORMS MONDALE!!!) There are 97 Mondale/McCain counties, and only 85 Dole/Obama counties (or independent cities).

However, there’s a key difference. While the Mondale/McCain counties are rural and very small (and generally stagnating or getting smaller), the Dole/Obama counties include many of the nation’s largest population centers. The Mondale/McCain counties have a median 2000 population of 16,000, while the Dole/Obama counties have a median population of 103,000. The sum population of all Mondale/McCain counties? 3,197,000. For all Dole/Obama counties: 25,846,000. There’s pretty much the story of the 2008 election right there.

More specifically, there are only five Mondale/McCain counties with a 2000 census population over 100,000. Four are collar counties around Pittsburgh (Beaver, Fayette, Washington, and Westmoreland). These are counties that used to be manufacturing and coal-based union strongholds, hence the willingness to vote Dem even in the face of all that was Mondale. Unfortunately, these counties all share one common thread: little in-migration, and an elderly population aging in place (all of these counties are 17-18% 65+, a rate unseen pretty much anywhere else other than Florida)… and these counties become both smaller and more conservative each year as former unionists die off. (Bear in mind John Murtha’s comments too, as most of these counties are the core of his district.)

The fifth county is Anoka County in the Minneapolis suburbs, where there may have been something of a favorite son effect in 1984, but this is also an area where exurbanification and the mega-church religious right seems to be edging out traditional rural Lutheran Minnesota values (as seen by this county’s choice of congresscritter: Michelle Bachmann).

By contrast, the four largest Dole/Obama counties all have a population over one million: Harris (Houston) and Dallas in Texas, and San Diego and Riverside in California. These are all counties that are young, fast-growing, and most ominously for the GOP, are on the verge of tipping to Hispanic pluralities in the next decade.

Now maybe that can be shrugged off because California and Texas weren’t in play this year, but in the 800,000-1,000,000 population range are a number of swing counties in swing states that basically swung the election: Orange County, Florida (Orlando), Marion County, Indiana (Indianapolis), Hamilton County, Ohio (Cincinnati), and Fairfax County, Virginia (DC suburbs). And below that, fully 43 of the 85 Dole/Obama counties have populations over 100,000. Even the loss of the Pittsburgh-area collar counties can be more than compensated, population-wise, with the four eastern Pennsylvania counties that went Dole/Obama: Berks, Chester, Dauphin, and Monroe.

Here’s a map of the Mondale/McCain counties (in red) and the Dole/Obama counties (in blue):

Continue over the flip for full lists of the counties…

Mondale/McCain counties

AL: Colbert, Jackson, Lawrence

AZ: Greenlee

GA: Crawford, Greene, Marion, McIntosh, Mitchell, Taylor, Telfair, Webster, Williamson

IL: Franklin

IA: Dallas, Davis, Monroe, Ringgold

KY: Ballard, Breathitt, Floyd, Harlan, Knott, Letcher, Livingston, Lyon, Magoffin, Marshall, Morgan, Muhlenberg, Perry, Pike, Union, Webster

LA: Allen, Pointe Coupee, West Baton Rouge, West Feliciana

MI: Keweenaw

MN: Anoka, Chisago, Jackson, Pennington

MO: Mississippi, Oregon, Reynolds

NC: Tyrrell

OK: Coal, Haskell, Hughes

PA: Armstrong, Beaver, Fayette, Greene, Lawrence, Washington, Westmoreland

SC: Edgefield

TN: Benton, Cannon, DeKalb, Franklin, Grundy, Henry, Hickman, Humphreys, Lake, Lincoln, Overton, Perry, Robertson, Smith, Stewart, Trousdale, Van Buren, Warren, White

TX: Cottle, Dickens, Fisher, Morris, Newton, Orange, Robertson, Stonewall, Swisher

VA: Buchanan, Dickenson, Russell

WV: Brooke, Clay, Fayette, Hancock, Lincoln, Logan, Mingo, Wyoming

Dole/Obama counties

AL: Jefferson

CA: Alpine, Butte, Mono, Nevada, Riverside, San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Trinity

CO: Arapahoe, Jefferson, La Plata, Larimer, Ouray, San Juan

FL: Orange

GA: Douglas, Newton, Rockdale

ID: Teton

IL: Boone, Carroll, DuPage, Kane, Kendall, McHenry, McLean, Sangamon, Stephenson

IN: Marion, Tippecanoe

MD: Charles

MI: Berrien, Clinton, Eaton, Jackson, Kent, Leelanau

MN: Olmsted

MS: Oktibbeha

MT: Lake, Lewis & Clark, Gallatin

NE: Douglas, Lancaster

NV: Carson City, Washoe

NH: Belknap, Carroll

NJ: Somerset

NM: Los Alamos

NC: Forsyth, Pitt, Wake, Watauga, Wilson

ND: Cass, Grand Forks

OH: Hamilton

PA: Berks, Chester, Dauphin, Monroe

SC: Barnwell, Charleston

SD: Brookings

TX: Dallas, Harris

UT: Grand

VA: Albemarle, Chesapeake, Danville, Fairfax, Fairfax city, Harrisonburg, Henrico, Loudoun, Manassas, Manassas Park, Prince William, Staunton, Winchester

WA: Island

WI: Calumet, Waupaca