Month: April 2009

According to the natural order of things, 2010 should be a good year for the Republicans.  However, they seem determined to drive the crazy train off the cliff instead of sitting down, shutting up, and letting nature take its course with a mid-term backlash against the incumbent party.  I’m predicting pretty good results for the Democrats.

SENATE

Democrats pick up six seats, Republicans none.  Great results for Dems driven by Repub retirements and a circular firing squad primary in Pennsylvania.

DEMOCRATIC PICKUPS:

FL – OPEN (Martinez) – My Mayor Pam Iorio runs and takes it to the house against Vern Buchanan.  Crist does not run.

MO – OPEN (Bond) – Robin Carnahan beats Roy Blunt.

NH – OPEN (Gregg) – Paul Hodes beats who knows what Republican.  Pick up the fundraising, though, dude.

NC – Burr – Roy Cooper takes out the ATM bandit.

OH – OPEN (Voinovich) – Lee Fisher beats Rob Portman.

PA – OPEN (Specter) – Pat Toomey beats Specter.  Joe Sestak changes his mind about running and destroys Toomey.

OTHER RACES OF INTEREST:

CO – Bennet – Bennet holds on with surprising comfort.  Repubs struggle to find a strong candidate.

CT – Dodd – Dodd stubbornly stays in the race, wins nailbiter over Rob Simmons.

DE – OPEN (Kaufman) – Beau Biden wins easily.  Castle does not run.

IL – OPEN (Burris) – Giannoulias beats Burris in the primary, cruises in the general.

KY – OPEN (Bunning) – Bunning drops out.  Trey Grayson squeeks past Jack Conway in the general.  Ben Chandler does not run.

LA – Vitter – Diaper Dave wins primary over porn star and wins general comfortably.  It’s always OK if you’re a Republican in LA these days.

NV – Reid – Repubs can’t find a strong candidate.  Reid holds on comfortably.

OK – OPEN (Coburn) – Coburn retires (it’s more fun being an M.D.), but Repubs hold on anyway.

HOUSE

Democrats gain five seats and lose one, for a net pickup of four.  Dem fundraising looks great.  I’m seeing a lot of incumbents winning, with Dem gains driven by Repub open seats.  

DEMOCRATIC PICKUPS

FL-10 – OPEN (Young) – Young retires (see miserable fundraising numbers).  Strong candidate Charlie Justice wins swing district.

IL-10 – OPEN (Kirk) – Kirk runs for Senate.  Democrat wins this heavily Dem district

LA-02 – Cao – Cao is destroyed by a prominent Democrat, perhaps Mayor Nagin.  This is no toss-up, Charlie Cook.

PA-06 – Gerlach – Gerlach taken out by Dem in what has become a heavily Dem district.

VA-10 – OPEN (Wolf)- Wolf retires (see miserable fundraising numbers).  Democrat squeeks by in this swing district.

REPUBLICAN PICKUP

ID-01 – Minnick – Sali defeated in primary.  Stronger Repub too much for Minnick to handle.

GOVERNORS

Democrats pick up five seats.  Republicans pick up five also, for a total wash.  

DEMOCRATIC PICKUPS

AZ – Brewer – Superhero Terry Goddard takes out the inept, flailing socialist tax hiker Jan Brewer.  I CHANGED THIS AFTER BEING CONVINCED BY PEOPLE SMARTER THAN ME THAT I AM WRONG.  

CA – OPEN (Schwartzenegger) – Dem partisan edge enough to carry Dem candidate, whomever it is.

HI – OPEN (Lingle) – Same story.  Dem partisan edge too much for Lt. Gov. Duke Aiona.

NV – Gibbons – Monumentally unpopular Gibbons loses to some member of the strong Democratic bench.

RI – OPEN (Carcieri) – Repub Laffey steers enough Repub votes away from Indy Chafee for Democrat to squeek by.

REPUBLICAN PICKUPS:

KS – OPEN (Sebelius) – With incoming Gov Parkinson unwilling to run as incumbent, partisan lean is too much.

OK – OPEN (Henry) – Dems have good candidates, but the partisan lean seems too much here.

TN – OPEN (Bredesen) – Tough egg for Dems these days.  Predict Republicans win fairly close race.

VA – OPEN (Kaine) – AG’s are tough to beat.  Unfortunate scandal for Moran this week, and I don’t think McAuliffe can win.  Mr. Deeds?  Probably not going to win the primary.

WY – OPEN (Freudenthal) – I don’t expect Freudenthal to go for the third term.  Partisan lean way too much.

OTHER RACES OF INTEREST:

GA – OPEN (Perdue) – Republican staves off tough challenge.

MI – OPEN (Granholm) – Dem squeeks by on partisan edge.  

MN – Pawlenty – Pawlenty wins a close one.

NJ – Corzine – Corzine squeeks by again by going deep into his piggy bank.

PA – OPEN (Rendell) – Western PA Dem (Onorato or Wagner) beats Repub Tom Corbett by about 5.

VT – Douglas – Douglas wins a narrow plurality in a three-way race.  Legislature respects the will of the voters and gives him the seat.

• NY-20 (pdf): This morning’s official tally from the BoE gives Scott Murphy a whopping lead of 268. This new number reflects the addition of all the remaining absentees from Columbia County, where Murphy performed well on Election Day and apparently even better among absentees. There are still 1,200 absentee ballots that haven’t been counted because they were subject to challenge; they’ll be reviewed starting Monday.

Jim Tedisco isn’t waiting around for those ballots, though; he’s already asking the courts to declare him the victor. Wait… what? Isn’t he the one who’s behind? (The Tedisco camp has tried to clarify that they were re-filing a motion that they filed on Election Day, to also have Tedisco declared the winner, as some sort of ‘insurance policy.’ OK, that makes me feel much better.)

• CA-10: BigDust broke the story yesterday in diaries: Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, seeing his gubernatorial campaign sputtering and lured by the siren call of a term-limits-free job, has more-or-less confirmed that the rumors are true and he’s jumping into the 10th District special election, where state senator Mark DeSaulnier had already nailed down the ‘establishment’ candidate mantle. (Unlike other frequent job-hopper Tom McClintock, Garamendi actually has the advantage of living in the district.)

• KY-Sen, SD-Sen: The message can’t get much clearer than this. Mitch McConnell is hosting a fundraiser in the state of Kentucky for his fellow senator… John Thune? That’s right; McConnell would rather help a guy from South Dakota defending a safe seat than help his fellow Kentuckian Jim Bunning, who has already been complaining about how McConnell is sucking up all the fundraising oxygen in the state.

• CT-Sen: Chris Dodd may have raised a million bucks last quarter, but only five donors were from his home state of Connecticut. And before you can say “But what about donations below $200 which don’t require detailed disclosure?”, we’ll just point out that Dodd took in under $2,300 total from that category of donors. Sigh. (D)

On the plus side for Dodd, he got a hearty endorsement and a promise of future help from someone a little more popular than him: Barack Obama. “Chris is going through a rough patch,” says Obama.

• NH-Sen: Paul Hodes raised $225K this quarter, which doesn’t seem like a whole lot, does it? (D)

• NJ-Gov: Governor Jon Corzine, facing a tough re-election, has another problem: his gross income last year was negative $2.75 million. You’ve got to assume that his overall net worth (once estimated at $300 million) has taken a much, much larger hit, so that calls into question his willingness, if not ability, to moneybomb the race as he did with his last two runs for office.

• TX-Gov: I never thought I’d have to say this out loud, but Governor Rick Perry may not have a winning issue on his hands when he makes veiled secession threats. A Rasmussen snap-poll finds that 75% of Texans would prefer to remain a part of the USA. 18% prefer secession, and 7% just aren’t sure. Not coincidentally, a similar percentage of the Texas state senate (71%) just voted, 22-9, to ignore Perry and accept the $550 million in federal stimulus money to keep their state unemployment trust fund from going broke.

• Words: Here’s a fun time-suck: a website that lets you create a word cloud for most-used words in a particular day, week, month, or year in the Congressional Record, or for a particular lawmaker.

February 24th, 2009:

At this morning’s House Republican Conference meeting, party leaders will unveil a new campaign fundraising and infrastructure program designed to strengthen vulnerable incumbents and hold Members more accountable if they expect any help from the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2010. …

The primary component of the new program will focus on 30 to 50 targeted GOP incumbents who could find themselves with a serious challenge on their hands in 2010. Those “patriots” are the ones who will likely be leaning on the NRCC the most this cycle.

In that sense, the Patriot program is similar to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “Frontline” program, which directs fundraising and other resources to vulnerable Members and has existed since the 2004 cycle. The DCCC released its list of 40 Frontline Members for 2010 on Monday. …

[T]he Patriot program will immediately help targeted Members most likely to need NRCC support this cycle…. (Emphasis added.)

* yawns *

* looks at calendar *

Huh, it’s already the middle of April. That NRCC list must be around here somewhere, right?

* checks Internet *

Weird.

* checks Internet some more *

Come on….

* e-mails Crisitunity *

No kidding. Very well, then. Take all the time you need, Pete Sessions! No hurry at all!

The FEC’s April 15th deadline for candidates to file their first quarter fundraising reports has come and gone, and now it’s SSP’s turn to rake together all the interesting numbers for House incumbents and the (very few) challengers who have filed.

As always, all numbers are in thousands and are adjusted for rounding. “CoH” indicates cash-on hand, and the “Raised” column contains strictly funds raised through donor contributions, not loans. An “X” in the “Frontline” column indicates a Democratic incumbent’s participation in the DCCC’s Frontline program.

A few quick notes:

• The average amount raised by a Frontline participant was $255K, with each member having an average CoH of $269K.
• The biggest raiser of the Frontline class was John Adler, who raked in $461K. The weakest? Carol Shea-Porter, who only took in $111K. She never makes our lives easy…
• Challengers who outraised incumbents: Beth Krom (D, CA-48), Steve Chabot (R, OH-01) and Jack McDonald (D, TX-10).
• Fuel for the retirement watch: Check out the weak hauls of GOP Reps. Henry Brown ($22K), Frank Wolf ($2K) and Bill Young ($1K). Delaware’s Mike Castle will want to pump up the volume now that he’s facing a top-tier challenger, but he’s also sitting on a fairly hefty war chest.
• ID-01: Bill “Brain Fade” Sali, who is supposedly mulling a rematch with Democrat Walt Minnick, brought in nothing — and he’s still carrying about $100,000 worth of debts from his previous two campaigns. Not exactly an encouraging sign for those of us who love to have Sali to kick around.
• LA-02: Joe Cao raises $143K, but only banks $61K at the end of the quarter. Not impressive at all — but even if he was raking in Mark Kirk-like sums per quarter, he’d still lose. So what’s the point?

Crossposted at DailyKos

I’ve always wanted to go hard after a white Southern suburban district in one of the three Southern megalopolises (Atlanta, Dallas/Ft. Worth, and Houston). To win a Southern district, conventional wisdom is that as a starting point the GOP Presidential candidate has to have gotten less than 55% in said district, and the most tempting three are in Texas. There’s the 10th District (Houston to Austin) and a pair of DFW metroplex district, the 32nd and 24th. Lets take a look at them.

Texas’s 10th Congressional District (Houston to Austin)

As far as Houston goes (sort of), there’s the 10th Congressional District (map), which McCain won 55-43. The 10th is a politically incoherent district-it stretches from Houston’s suburbs where over a third of the population is to downtown Austin, which casts about 40% of the vote. In between the two are a bunch of Republican rural counties. At first look, its an intriguing target- its current member is Michael McCaul, who is only a three term incumbent who has struggled to outperform the Republican presidential nominee. In other words, he’s got almost no personal appeal. A lot of people point to this as Democrats best hope for a pick up in the Lone Star State.

I’m not so sure that its the best way to go for a single reason-you’re going to have to spend a truckload and a half of money to win it because you have to buy media time in not only the hugely expensive Houston media market but also Austin as well. McCaul has access to a ton of personal wealth and can draw on that at any time.

We do have some things going for us in this district:

a)Our candidate in the race, Jack McDonald, raised $300,000 in 5 weeks. That’s a nice chunk of change, and those are the sort of numbers you’d need to be competitive. At very minimum, to win the 10th, you’re going to have to spend 1.75 million or so, and more likely close to 2 million.

b)If hugely popular Houston mayor Bill White ends up as our Senate candidate, there’s the potential that his coattails could help McDonald in the Harris County portion of the district.

c)McCaul’s fundraising numbers blew chunks this quarter, raising only $97k. That said, he can always write himself a check.

Texas’s 32nd Congressional District (Highland Park-University Park-Irving)

The other seats that look promising are in the DFW metroplex.

As tempting of a target as the 24th is, on paper its not the best target in the DFW area (yet); if the DCCC gave me a couple million dollars and forced me to spend it in a single Texas district, I’d spend it in the Texas 32nd (map)(assuming we had a good candidate). Why? First off, McCain only got a paltry 53% of the vote here. Barack Obama did not heavily contest Texas and still got 46% of the vote here. With a full on push, he would have probably come very close to winning it outright. Then there’s the trending-Bush carried the 32nd with 64% in 2000 and 60% in 2004. That’s a staggering 11 point drop in 8 years and 6 points difference in a single 4 year cycle. In other words, the GOP performance here is dropping like a rock.

It gets better than just the raw numbers-the demographics here are very encouraging. There’s a distinct reason why Martin Frost chose to run here instead of in the 24th District after the DeLaymander, and Martin Frost was no dummy. It’s 36.2% Hispanic and 7.9% African American, which is a fantastic base to build off of for a Democratic candidate. But it gets even better, the bulk of Dallas’s Jewish community lives in the University Park and Highland Park portions of the 32nd.

Now, lets talk about the incumbent, Pete Sessions. Sessions, though he’s been in Congress for awhile, isn’t as entrenched in his district as you think he might be. Sessions originally represented the 5th District from 1997 to 2002 when he moved into the 32nd because the 5th got more Democratic. The 32nd was then massively rejiggered in the DeLaymander to crack Martin Frost’s old 24th District, and he got a bunch of new turf that spells long term trouble for him. His district is shaky enough for him that he had to have W fly into his district the night before the election for a big rally to put him over the top. Finally, he’s the current chair of the RNCC-dropping money here simply to make his life miserable is far from the worst idea I’ve heard.

Another good thing about the 32nd is that unlike the 10th, the 32nd is in a single media market, albeit the gigantic Dallas-Ft. Worth one. You’d get more bang for your advertising bucks here than you would in the 10th, having to split ad buys between Houston and Austin.

As far as a bench in the district is concerned, there are two or three interesting possibilities in the Texas House. The best fit, in my opinion would be Kirk England who represents part of the 32nd in Irving-the downside being that he lives in Grand Prairie which is in the 24th. There’s also Rafael Anchía, who represents the 103rd District and Roberto Alonzo in 104. I’m not completely sure that a Latino couldn’t win this district, but it is probably better suited to a white Martin Frost-ish candidate. Still, with a 44%+ minority base, its far from inconceivable that a Latino could do it, especially with a huge voter registration campaign in the Latino friendly parts of the district.

Texas’s 24th Congressional District (Carrolton-Colleyville-Grand Prairie)

The  Texas 24th is a similar district to the 32nd, but its a little less appealing on some fronts and more appealing on others:

-Kenny Marchant has been the State Rep for Carrolton forever and a day and probably has a better hold on the 24th than Sessions does in the 32nd

-McCain got 55% here vs 53% in the 32nd, Obama got 44% vs. 46%

-there’s not nearly the Jewish community in the 24th that there is in the 32nd

-Marchant isn’t going to be crisscrossing the country as RNCC chair like Sessions will and can campaign full time (but on the other hand he has less access to cold hard cash than Sessions does)

-the Latino component is half as big as the 32nd, though its an open question as to how many in the Latino community are registrable

What is better:

+ conversely, we almost have to have done better among white voters here, and the African American component is higher than in the 32nd

+ 24 is falling off that GOP performance cliff even faster than 32, having lost 13 points in 8 years, and *****10***** points from ’04 to ’08

+ From ’00 to ’06, the 24th had a higher Latino population gain than did 32nd (79,641 vs. 44,824)

+ 24 also had much higher growth influxes among AA voters (28,387 vs 6,716) and Asians (23,600 vs. -1,596)

The bench is largely the same, though as mentioned, Kirk England lives in this district and not 32. Long term, the GOP is going to have to draw another Democratic DFW district (knowing the TXGOP they’ll probably draw it as a Minority Majority Latino district for Anchia), and everyone knows it. Thus, there’s probably less urgency to take the risk and run here vs the 10th-the situation with Harris’s new seat is much more muddled than the DFW seat.

All three districts look as tempting as BBQ brisket, with the 32nd being the best on paper, the 24th having the fastest falling GOP performance, and McCaul having the weakest hold on his district.

There’s suddenly been a lot of discussion of the Republican-held districts in California being the next big treasure trove of Democratic pickups in the House, surprising considering that California has a very bifurcated political geography and, on top of that, one of the most aggressively pro-incumbent gerrymanders. This started with a study published by the California Target Book showing precipitously declining GOP registrations, and continued with the DCCC‘s announcement that it would go big in 2010 in the eight districts where Obama won that are still occupied by House Republicans.

For instance, CA-26 has shown a drop in the GOP’s registration edge from 2002 to 2008 from 11% to 6%, CA-45 has seen a similar drop from 11% to 4%, and perhaps most out of left field, Buck McKeon’s CA-25 has dropped from 9% to 1%. In CA-03 (where Dan Lungren barely escaped in 2008), it dropped from 11% to 2%, and in CA-44 (where Ken Calvert escaped even more narrowly), it dropped from 16% to 7%.

What’s driving these changing registrations? Is it just ticked-off moderates realizing that something’s amiss with today’s GOP and changing teams? I’m sure there’s some of that happening, but that can’t by itself explain the size of those numbers. What’s driving this seems to be the changing demographics of who’s moving into and out of these districts. With the GOP’s declining fortunes among Latino and Asian voters (fueled by the GOP’s own self-defeating hardline extremism on the immigration issue), it can’t help that those are where most of the growth is happening in most of these districts.

While the magnitude of the demographic sea change in California isn’t as great as the non-white growth in Texas (which I wrote about prior to the 2008 election), it’s still impressive to see. This chart details the changes in each group from the 2000 census to the 2007 estimate, for each House district that’s held by the Republicans. (‘White’ means non-Hispanic white.)

District	Rep.	Kerry %	Obama %	Total gain	White gain	Af.-Am. gain	Asian gain	Hispanic gain
CA-02	Herger	37	43	67,021	27,716	1,337	5,805	29,851
CA-03	Lungren	41	49	146,160	45,010	20,391	38,477	44,250
CA-04	McClintock	37	44	112,419	62,724	3,839	18,398	25,547
CA-19	Radanovich	38	46	101,949	20,874	9,436	8,596	66,772
CA-21	Nunes	34	42	108,725	6,981	1,405	11,334	88,698
CA-22	McCarthy	31	38	128,449	7,546	16,822	6,942	96,609
CA-24	Gallegly	43	51	44,034	– 9,600	– 1,413	7,750	49,124
CA-25	McKeon	40	50	143,246	– 26,236	25,300	15,935	119,934
CA-26	Dreier	44	51	51,417	– 14,604	– 1,491	26,625	47,452
CA-40	Royce	39	47	29,403	– 43,083	5,837	23,992	48,880
CA-41	Lewis	37	44	136,950	– 734	16,196	16,845	107,741
CA-42	G. Miller	37	45	47,896	– 4,641	– 1,397	15,719	46,613
CA-44	Calvert	40	50	198,959	35,183	12,632	19,101	126,396
CA-45	Bono Mack	43	52	225,020	50,882	13,581	18,181	135,086
CA-46	Rohrabacher	42	48	16,612	– 18,782	2,464	23,496	12,397
CA-48	Campbell	40	49	78,712	2,273	4,327	45,264	31,105
CA-49	Issa	36	45	132,037	32,752	2,981	20,122	76,245
CA-50	Bilbray	44	51	68,851	10,987	992	22,038	35,297
CA-52	Hunter	38	45	21,746	– 16,440	1,424	12,635	20,083

Bear in mind that not all of the Latino persons listed here are able to vote, either because they aren’t citizens or are too young, so this is more of a time-bomb in some districts, like the ones in the mostly-agricultural Central Valley. Case in point is CA-21, which (along with CA-45) is the only of these districts to have moved into an outright Latino plurality this decade, but is still one of the most Republican districts in the state.

On the other hand, some of the more suburban districts, like CA-44 and CA-45 in Riverside County, are poised to flip pretty soon (although these are two of the most hard-hit districts anywhere by the foreclosure crisis and the collapse of the construction industry, so it’ll require a lot of watching in these districts to see who stays and who goes). And even more surprisingly, CA-25 is zooming in our direction, at least demographically, making the drop to a 1% GOP registration edge maybe not that unexpected. (There’s only one district that seems to be bucking this overall trend, where most of the growth is white, and that’s CA-04… oddly enough, the district of all these where we came closest in 2008 to picking up the House seat, although the circumstances there were unusual.)

As in Texas, these changes aren’t going to happen overnight. But in the red parts of California, as with Texas, in the next decade, we’re either going to see a GOP that changes its message (and, well, everything else) to appeal to a more diverse America, or that starts hemmorhaging seats in its once-red strongholds.

We told you about lousy & lousier… here comes the lousiest:

Burris campaign officials on Thursday released a report showing the new senator raised only $845 from January through March and had $111,032 in debts from defending himself in ongoing ethics and perjury probes and travel.

That’s a pretty remarkable haul (yes, that’s not even nine Benjamins), even for someone as scandal-tainted as Roland Burris. One has to almost try in order to avoid raising at least some money as a sitting Senator. (What, you mean to tell me that he couldn’t have squeezed out a couple of grand out of Bobby Rush’s campaign committee?)

Burris has his first real fundraiser scheduled for this weekend, but this kind of pathetic first quarter haul may give us a window to his 2010 intentions. If he actually does intend to give 2010 a crack, he’ll be hard-pressed to keep up with state Treasurer Alex Giannoulias, who outraised Burris by over a 1000-to-1 margin in the first quarter.

(Hat-tip to conspiracy for the catch)

Somewhat sucky news:

Less than three months after saying he would consider a run next year for attorney general of Texas, third-term U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, told the American-Statesman’s Danny Yadron on Wednesday that the AG option is no longer on his plate.

Asked if he was still mulling a run for attorney general, McCaul replied: “No, I’m running for re-election.”

This confirms an earlier statement from a McCaul spokesman. While it would have been nice to have an open seat here, Democrats fortunately have a good candidate in Jack McDonald, who has already raised over $300K and previously said he’d run no matter what McCaul decided. Indeed, the DCCC has already targeted McCaul, firing off a few radio ads over his vote against the stimulus.

And according to SSP’s analysis of the presidential vote, Barack Obama improved nicely over John Kerry’s numbers – McCain won the district 55-44, versus Bush’s 62-38 pounding. In a separate analysis of Texas demographics, Crisitunity observed that the 10th CD had the largest raw increase in Hispanic population from 2000 to 2006 of any district in the Houston or Dallas areas. That trend has doubtless continued, putting the GOP on ever-thinner ice.

McCaul, meanwhile, is far from entrenched – he won his last two elections with just 55% and 54% of the vote, running against underfunded opponents both times. I think this is going to be an interesting race.

• NY-20 (pdf): There’s light at the end of the tunnel in the NY-20 count, and as we get closer, Scott Murphy’s numbers keep going up. This morning’s BoE tally gives him a lead of 167, following the addition of more votes from Columbia, Dutchess, and Warren Counties (all of which Murphy won on Election Day).

Apparently all Saratoga County votes are accounted for, except for 700 challenged ballots, which, thanks to yesterday’s court ruling, will be counted. (While Saratoga County in general is Jim Tedisco’s turf, the Tedisco camp’s heavy use of challenges of student votes suggests that these votes may include a lot of votes from artsy Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, which one would expect to lean Democratic.)

• CO-Sen: Finally, a GOPer commits to the Colorado senate race against appointee Michael Bennet. It’s Aurora city councilor Ryan Frazier, who made his announcement while teabagging in Grand Junction. Frazier is 31 and African-American, so he brings an interesting backstory to the race, but it’s unclear whether his strength among conservative activists can overcome his otherwise low profile in the GOP primary (assuming anyone else bothers to show up).

• FL-Sen: Quinnipiac takes another look at the Florida senate race; not much has changed since last time, although one noteworthy finding is that Floridians would prefer to see Charlie Crist remain as governor rather than jump to senate, by a 42-26 margin. That doesn’t stop him from crushing in the senate primary (Crist beats Marco Rubio and Vern Buchanan 54-8-8). Buchanan leads a Crist-free primary, while on the Dem side, Kendrick Meek narrowly leads Pam Iorio (16-15, with 8 for Ron Klein, 5 from Dan Gelber, and a whole lotta undecideds).

• PA-Sen: John Peterson isn’t a make-or-break endorsement, but the former GOP representative from rural PA-05 said that he won’t support Arlen Specter’s re-election bid in 2010. He stopped short of endorsing Pat Toomey (Peterson supported Specter in the 2004 primary), but said it was time for Specter to retire. In other completely unsurprising endorsement news, the Club for Growth (of which Pat Toomey was president until several days ago) today endorsed Toomey’s bid. Laugh all you want, but Toomey will need all the financial help he can get; Specter hauled in $1.3 million in Q1 and is sitting on $6.7 million CoH.

• TX-Sen: Our friends at Burnt Orange Report have a nice graph showing Bill White and John Sharp dominating the fundraising chase so far in the hypothetical Texas senate race. (The chart doesn’t include GOP heavyweights Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and AG Greg Abbott, who haven’t taken formal steps for the race, but whose cash stashes are state-specific, putting them back to fundraising square one if they ran for senate.)

• CT-Sen: If Chris Dodd is going to win again in 2010, it’s going to be on the back of money, not popularity. Luckily, he still has lots of the former, as big-money donors aren’t being scared off by his poll numbers: he raised $1 million in the first quarter, with $1.4 million CoH.

• MN-Sen (pdf): Minnesotans would like the madness to stop, and would like to have a 2nd senator. PPP finds that 63% think that Norm Coleman should concede right now, and 59% (including 54% of independents) think Tim Pawlenty should sign Al Franken’s certificate of election right now. (This should give Pawlenty some pause as to whether or not to create further delay in the name of partisan politics, as he’s about the only person left who can drag this out.)

• MO-Sen: Roy Blunt raised $542K in the first quarter, only about half of what Robin Carnahan raised. Our JeremiahTheMessiah came up with the best possible headline for this story:

Carnahan Smokes Blunt… In Fundraising

• GA-Gov: As reported in the diaries yesterday by fitchfan28, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle dropped out of the gubernatorial race, citing health concerns. Cagle was more-or-less front-runner, and his departure leaves SoS Karen Handel and Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine to slug it out for the GOP.

• IL-10, PA-07: Two huge fundraising hauls (by House standards) from two candidates who may be looking to move up. Mark Kirk, who pulled in $696K in the first quarter, is supposed to decide soon whether or not to try for IL-Sen. (He has only $597K CoH, though, after burning through all his cash defending his seat in 2008. So he may just be raising hard in expectation of another top-tier challenge in 2010 in this blue district.)

Joe Sestak raised $550K in the first quarter, leaving him sitting on a mongo $3.3 million. Could this… plus his suddenly increased media presence, as he talks the defense budget and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell… be tea leaves that he may be the Dem who jumps into PA-Sen after all? (Sestak has previously declined, and he’s always been mentioned as an afterthought in this race after Allyson Schwartz and Patrick Murphy. But neither of them have made any moves, leaving Joe Torsella the only Dem challenger so far.)

• Numbers: California’s Secretary of State office finally released its Supplement to the Statement of Vote, heaven for nerds. Now you can look up Presidential and Prop 8 votes not just by congressional district, but by state senate or assembly district or even Board of Equalization district.