Month: April 2009

It’s been widely rumored for several weeks, but today it became official: Kentucky AG Jack Conway will be running for the Democratic nomination in the 2010 Senate race.

Attorney General Jack Conway said today that he will seek the Democratic nomination next year for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Jim Bunning….

The attorney general is expected to kick off his campaign with a press conference Monday attended by Luallen, Chandler, U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth, D-3rd District, and perhaps other Democratic leaders who are backing him.

This comes hot on the heels of yesterday’s blockbuster PPP poll that showed every possible Democrat beating Jim Bunning. The poll showed Rep. Ben Chandler in the best position vis a vis Bunning, leaving me momentarily wondering if Chandler would try elbowing Conway aside, but it looks like the informal troika of Chandler, Conway, and Luallen have successfully resolved the issue of who gets to run for Senate, and will all be appearing together. (The same poll shows Conway beating Bunning by 9, so we’re still in great shape with him.)

This won’t be an uncontested primary. Far from it, as Conway will still need to get past Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo, who doesn’t match up as well against Bunning according to PPP, but has the advantage of having come within a few points of Bunning in 2004, and who has the endorsement of Gov. Steve Beshear. As with the Democratic primary in Ohio, the trick will be keeping the primary competitive enough that the candidates get the free media needed to raise their profiles going into the general, but keeping it from lapsing into the negativity that can wound the primary winner going forward. (H/t MediaCzech and generalleeferd.)

(crossposted at Barefoot and Progressive)

I’m thrilled to report that the next Senator from the state of Kentucky has just announced his candidacy this morning. Our state’s 11-year nightmare of Jim Bunning is about to end in November 2010, and here is the man that will end it.

Meet KY Attorney General Jack Conway.

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As you can see in his announcement video on his site, Conway will have his official in-person rally to kick off his campaign Monday in Louisville. I can’t go into all of the details now, but let’s just say that Ben Chandler, Crit Luallen, John Yarmuth, and about every big KY Democrat past and present whose name isn’t Steve Beshear will be there. And a “surprise guest”.

Now, let me discuss the primary battle that we face here in Kentucky over the next year.

There are those who say that since Kentucky is a conservative state, we have to settle for a conservative Blue Dog Democratic candidate in order to compete for the Senate seat. Dan Mongiardo is the Blue Dog that some are pointing to, as he co-sponsored the Rovian anti-gay amendment here in 2004, he constantly shills for the abomination that is mountaintop removal mining, and he has no problem speaking at NRA conventions in between Glenn Beck, Karl Rove and Mitt Romney bashing Democrats who will “take away their guns”.

Let me say, in no uncertain terms, that the PPP poll that came out yesterday absolutely killed that meme. DEAD.

Not only are the much more progressive Jack Conway’s approval ratings higher than Dan Mongiardo’s (Conway at 40/21, Mongiardo at 41/34), but Conway performs better in a head-to-head match-up against Bunning, winning 42%-33%.

We don’t need a Blue Dog to beat Jim Bunning. Jack Conway is a progressive Democrat with integrity that can whip Jim Bunning any day of the week.

But let’s say that KY Republicans like Mitch McConnell are able to successfully force Bunning out of the race and replace him with the much more formidable KY Sec. of State Trey Grayson. Even in this scenario, the PPP poll shows Jack Conway beating Grayson by 4 points. Mongiardo? He loses to Grayson by 4 points.

Again: we don’t have to settle for a conservative Blue Dog in this race. We have Jack Conway.

Kentucky progressives are already stepping up and showing that we don’t have to settle for the lesser of two evils in this race. The Facebook group I started “Kentuckians Against Homophobia, Mountaintop Removal, and Dan Mongiardo” has more members than the Mongiardo for Senate Facebook group. We know that Bunning is vulnerable, and we don’t have to settle for another Ben Nelson or Blanche Lincoln.

Please check out Jack Conway’s campaign website, and please consider throwing some turkee his way. We have a great candidate with a great shot of taking another big seat away from the Party of No in November 2010.

The discussion regarding “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” surprised me in that a number of people volunteered their age and were, on the whole, younger than I imagined the members of this site to be.  To test this hypothesis, (since the Bueller sample may have been self selecting, for obvious reasons) I’ve created a poll.  The age spreads are a bit narrower for the younger ages.  If people enjoy this, I will perhaps do more demographic polls in the future.

I have done an intensive county-by-county analysis study of the state of OHIO vis-a-vis the presidential election from 2008.

The document is in three parts and published at GOOGLE DOCS.

Part I

Part II

Part III

The excel spreadsheet with all the raw data

As was the case with INDIANA, the study of OHIO was fascinating and provides much thought provoking information.

The advantage of GOOGLE DOCS is that I can continue to update and correct a document and it will be automatically republished without the link changing.

Next state for intensive county by county study: VIRGINIA

Time for another installment in the slicing ‘n’ dicing of our presidential-election-results-by-congressional district dataset. One interesting thing I noticed (that has sort of a “well, duh” feel to it if you think about it for a minute) is that the districts that had the largest raw numbers of votes for Obama or for McCain were rarely the same districts that gave them the best percentages.

The raw vote numbers instead can point to a variety of factors: districts that experienced rapid population growth since redistricting, districts that started out the decade with high population (for instance, some at-large districts haven’t grown much, but have always been very big), districts in civic-minded states (like Wisconsin and Oregon) where turnout is always high, and low-income minority-majority districts (where, despite increased turnout for Obama, overall turnout is still comparatively low).

District	Rep.	Obama votes	District	Rep.	Obama votes
WA-07	McDermott	308,226	TN-01	Roe	75,255
PA-02	Fattah	298,834	AL-06	Bachus	74,657
WI-02	Baldwin	286,089	TX-08	Brady	74,545
NC-04	Price	275,205	NE-03	Smith	73,099
MD-04	Edwards	270,377	GA-09	Deal	70,366
CA-08	Pelosi	266,210	TX-29	Green	66,808
IL-02	Jackson	260,869	TX-19	Neugebauer	65,020
CA-09	Lee	260,662	AL-04	Aderholt	58,863
OR-03	Blumenauer	260,128	TX-11	Conaway	58,326
IL-07	Davis	255,470	TX-13	Thornberry	53,860

The biggest Obama vote totals tended to come in districts that don’t necessarily have the highest PVIs, but are the some of the most stereotypically “liberal” districts centered on mostly-white cities with left-leaning traditions (Seattle, Madison, San Francisco, Portland). Some of the more relatively affluent African-American-majority districts round out the list. (The lowest Obama totals did in fact come from the districts with the worst Obama percentages, with one big exception: TX-29, which Obama won easily, but has the fewest total votes of any district.)

District	Rep.	McCain votes	District	Rep.	McCain votes
FL-05	Brown-Waite	249,328	CA-35	Waters	27,789
WI-05	Sensenbrenner	243,597	CA-33	Watson	27,672
AL-06	Bachus	243,465	CA-31	Becerra	25,441
MT-AL	Rehberg	242,763	NY-12	Velazquez	23,504
GA-03	Westmoreland	235,263	NY-06	Meeks	22,302
FL-01	Miller	234,185	NY-11	Clarke	20,709
FL-04	Crenshaw	233,446	NY-10	Towns	19,677
CO-06	Coffman	229,715	IL-04	Gutierrez	18,453
TN-07	Blackburn	229,068	NY-15	Rangel	14,954
FL-06	Stearns	228,651	NY-16	Serrano	8,437

The highest McCain vote totals mostly came in rapidly growing suburban districts that lean Republican (MT-AL is also here, simply by virtue of its size). Half of these districts are ones where Obama got at least 40% of the vote, so these aren’t necessarily the most right-wing territory (heh, except for AL-06). However, these are districts that will need to shed population with 2012 redistricting, so their Republican lean may leach out into currently neighboring districts. (The districts with the most pitiable McCain totals tend to overlap the districts with the highest PVIs.)

District	Rep.	Total votes	District	Rep.	Total votes
MT-AL	Rehberg	491,092	TX-15	Hinojosa	167,821
FL-05	Brown-Waite	446,316	NY-16	Serrano	167,443
NC-04	Price	438,937	CA-43	Baca	164,830
CO-06	Coffman	437,740	CA-34	Roybal-Allard	142,774
WI-05	Sensenbrenner	421,962	CA-31	Becerra	142,662
WI-02	Baldwin	414,638	IL-04	Gutierrez	139,546
DE-AL	Castle	412,412	AZ-04	Pastor	132,076
MN-06	Bachmann	412,408	CA-20	Costa	129,561
FL-06	Stearns	408,014	CA-47	Sanchez	128,277
FL-07	Mica	401,966	TX-29	Green	108,507

For context, here are the districts with the highest and lowest total number of votes. The districts with the greatest numbers of votes are mostly ones we’ve already seen, depending on whether they lean Democratic or Republican. The lowest totals are in Hispanic-majority districts, where citizenship and language barriers are at issue.

• IL-05: Congratulations to our newest House member, Mike Quigley. The Cook County Commissioner won the special election in this safe Dem seat last night, defeating GOPer Rosanna Pulido 70-24 (with the balance going to Green Party candidate Matt Reichel). (There were only about 34,000 votes cast in this election, compared with about 58,000 in the primary, since that’s where all the action was.)

• AK-Sen: Gov. Sarah Palin will not be challenging Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the 2010 senate primary; in fact, she’ll be assisting Murkowski with raising money (despite simmering tensions between the two factions). It remains to be seen whether she’ll be running for re-election as governor in 2010, or bailing out after one term to focus on the 2012 presidential race (which, geographically speaking, is hard to do from Alaska).

• VA-Gov: If there’s one thing Terry McAuliffe is good at, it’s raising money. He raked in $4.2 million in the first quarter for his gubernatorial campaign. He started April with $2.5 million CoH as the race heads toward the June 9 primary.

• IA-Gov: With Iowa’s Supreme Court having effectively made same-sex marriages legal, the 2010 governor’s race could turn into a proxy referendum on the issue (with Gov. Chet Culver unwilling to amend the state constitution to block the courts). And this may draw a higher-profile challenger to the race: nutty GOP Rep. Steve King, whose name has been occasionally associated with this race, says the sudden rise of this issue makes him “more likely” to enter the race.

• GA-Gov: As noted by fitchfan28 in diaries, state House minority leader Dubose Porter has thrown his hat into the ring for the Democratic nomination for Georgia governor. He joins AG Thurbert Baker and former SoS David Poythress as announced candidates, with former governor Roy Barnes scoping out the race as well.

• NJ-12: Rush Holt may receive a credible challenge in 2010, from Fair Haven mayor Mike Halfacre, who just filed exploratory paperwork. Fair Haven is in Republican-leaning Monmouth County; the district as a whole, though, is blue, if not overwhelming so (Obama won 58-41).

• EFCA: In the wake of yesterday’s announcement that Blanche Lincoln would oppose EFCA’s current form, two more moderate Dem wafflers got off the fence in favor of EFCA (or, more technically, in favor of cloture): Mark Udall and Mark Warner. Campaign Diaries has a very handy head count, indicating that possible passage is still very close, and an unpacked version of the bill (for instance, containing the binding arbitration portion, leaving ‘card check’ for another year) may still be passed.

• CfG: With Pat Toomey about to leave the helm of the Club for Growth to pursue his senate bid against Arlen Specter, they need someone new to wave the sword for the circular firing squad. Looks like the job may fall to yet another ex-Rep who brought the crazy to a swing district, Chris Chocola. (Chocola got bounced from IN-02 in 2006 by Joe Donnelly.)

• Omaha-Mayor: In last night’s Omaha mayoral all-party primary election, former GOP Rep. Hal Daub (himself a former Omaha mayor) squeaked into first place with 35.6% of the vote to Democratic concilman Jim Suttle’s 34.3%. Republican Councilman Jim Vokal came in third, picking up 28.2% of the vote. New Nebraska Network’s Kyle Michaelis argues that despite the Republican candidates picking up more votes overall, Daub’s weak finish is not a good sign for his chances in the general election. (J)

PPP (4/2-3, registered voters):

Ben Chandler (D): 47

Jim Bunning (R-inc): 33

Jack Conway (D): 42

Jim Bunning (R-inc): 33

Crit Luallen (D): 42

Jim Bunning (R-inc): 34

Dan Mongiardo (D): 43

Jim Bunning (R-inc): 36

Ben Chandler (D): 40

Trey Grayson (R): 34

Jack Conway (D): 37

Trey Grayson (R): 33

Crit Luallen (D): 34

Trey Grayson (R): 36

Dan Mongiardo (D): 36

Trey Grayson (R): 40

(MoE: ±4%)

We’ve had lots of clues that Jim Bunning is in trouble: a Research 2000 poll from January showing him in dead heats with Democratic challengers, reports of “lousy” fundraising, and not-so-private efforts by Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn to give him his gold watch and usher him out the back door. But now we have a poll, via PPP, that shows just how dire things have gotten for him. Bunning’s job performance approval is 28/54 (notably worse than anything Chris Dodd has put up lately), and only 42% of Republicans approve.

Bunning loses by fairly wide margins to all four of his potential Democratic challengers, most significantly losing by 14 to Rep. Ben Chandler. (Chandler, AG Jack Conway, and Auditor Crit Luallen all seem to be in a semi-friendly standoff over which one gets to run; maybe these numbers will prompt Chandler to jump.) Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo is the only candidate in the race; although he would seem to have a name rec advantage from having run against Bunning in 2004, Mongiardo actually fares the least well, winning by ‘only’ 7. Mongiardo is the best-known of the Big 4, but has the highest negatives too, with 41/34 favorability. (The Lexington-based Chandler is at 38/28.)

The best favorability numbers in the poll, however, belong to Republican SoS Trey Grayson, who’s at 46/19. In head-to-heads Grayson also fares much better than Bunning, losing to Chandler by 6, to Conway by 4, and narrowly beating Luallen and Mongiardo. This points to one potential danger for Democrats: that Bunning is hitting his nadir too early, giving him plenty of time to shuffle off into retirement and allow the more likable Grayson time to ramp up for a competitive run. Of course, that scenario presupposes a rational Bunning interested in doing what’s best for the whole state GOP, not just for Jim Bunning.

PPP also polls state senate president David Williams as a potential GOP candidate (Williams met with Cornyn regarding a possible run). However, Williams fares even worse than Bunning in head-to-heads, losing 45-30 to Chandler, 43-29 to Conway, 41-31 to Luallen, and 43-32 to Mongiardo. I initially assumed the problem with Williams is he’s a little-known state legislator, but he seems as well-known as the Democratic candidates; he just has lousy favorability ratings (28/41). So for the GOP, it’s starting to look like Grayson or bust.

An interesting and in-depth look from Tampa Bay Online:

Florida Republican Party circles are hearing increasing talk of conservative dissatisfaction with Gov. Charlie Crist and a possible primary challenge if he runs for the U.S. Senate next year.

Crist’s high poll ratings, which muted such criticism early in his term, remain high, pollsters say, but are no longer preventing the talk.

Some conservatives, never happy with Crist’s emphasis on racial diversity, environmental regulation and populist willingness to take on big business, are now saying it openly.

“It’s the kind of disappointment that’s going to have people looking in other directions for leaders,” said former state Rep. Dennis Baxley of Ocala, now executive director of the Florida Christian Coalition. “The conservative movement needs a strong leader.”

The article confirms that the two most likely folks to take on Crist are former House speakers Marco Rubio and Alan Bense. While the poll numbers look daunting right now, I’d point out that long odds and self-defeating primaries are nothing new to the conservative movement. Incidentally, Pat Toomey had atrocious poll numbers just weeks before his 2004 primary with Arlen Specter; he lost by just two points and is now poised to spank Snarlin’ Arlen hard next year in their rematch. Oh, and Crist wouldn’t even be the incumbent. It’s doable.

Me, I’m like the dog: