Month: May 2009

DemocracyFest is a political festival for liberal/progressive activists which features trainings, speakers and entertainment; teaching people how to make a difference and have fun doing it! Prior DemocracyFests have been held in Massachusetts, Texas, California, New Hampshire and Virginia. Over 4,000 activists have been trained to help on campaigns and make a difference in their communities.

The 6th Annual DemocracyFest will be held this summer, July 17-19, 2009 at the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in Burlington, VT!

More information about the event at http://www.DemocracyFest.net

For reasons that remain unclear to me, the GOP has rushed to embrace Twitter as the tool that will lead them out of the wilderness. (Maybe it’s because it’s a medium that not only doesn’t require you to have thoughts that take up more than 140 characters, but that doesn’t even allow them.) Nevertheless, over its short lifetime, the GOP’s infatuation with Twitter seems to have produced more petard-hoistings and outright FAILs than it has victories for the GOP’s twits:

• the time errant tweets scuttled a GOP plan to flip a Dem to take control of the Virginia Senate,

• House Intelligence ranking member Pete Hoekstra twittering away his positions in Iraq,

• Wayne Mosely‘s recent hilarious overselling of his campaign,

• Joe Barton‘s hubris over what he perceived as his takedown of Energy Secretary Steven Chu followed by his twittering away with catty remarks like a bored teenager during the SOTU, and

• somebody’s decision to direct the entire #NY20 feed onto Jim Tedisco‘s website, Dem press releases and all.

Well, we have an incident that may beat all of those: Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff accidentally announced his own candidacy for the GOP Senate nomination on his Twitter account, apparently thinking that he was just texting to an acquaintance instead. (His account has been scrubbed, but the memory lives on, hewn in the living rock of screen capture.) According to the Salt Lake Tribune:

“I’m announcing I’m running at 12,” Shurtleff wrote in part of a series of garbled messages, called tweets on the digital networking system.

In another he said he would have “all of the legislative conservative causcus (sic) and other senators and representatives there endorsing me. Time to rock and roll!”

Shurtleff later amended his statement to say that he was still deciding, and would make a formal announcement regarding his plans on May 20.

So, all’s well that ends well… uh, wait, what? There’s a competitive Senate race in Utah? Don’t they already have Bob Bennett? It’s true: with Shurtleff’s, um, entry into the race, it’s a major primary challenge to Utah’s long-serving (since 1992) junior senator. No one would mistake the uncontroversial Bennett for a moderate, but there’s enough rabid conservatism in Utah that Bennett’s vote for the bailout bill last year (and his unforgivable willingess to occasionally engage his Democratic colleagues in productive conversation) are apparently justification enough for a challenge from the very right.

Utah is also enough of a one-party state that primary challenges within the GOP are the only way for ambitious, restive younger members to climb the ladder. That was what happened last year in UT-03, where young movement-conservative Jason Chaffetz picked off longtime establishment Rep. Chris Cannon.

There’s at least an outside shot of that same thing happening here, and that’s partially due to Utah’s weird nominating system. GOP candidates go through a May 2010 nominating convention, where ballots are taken repeatedly with the lowest-scoring candidate removed after each round, until two men remain, both of whom advance to the primary… but if any candidate gets more than 60% of the vote at any point, he not only wins the nomination but there isn’t even a primary election. When Chaffetz won the nominating convention in 2008 (although not clearing the 60% bar), that was a clear indicator that he was the man to beat going into the UT-03 primary.

If Shurtleff is correct about having locked down the support of the conservative wing among the state legislators, he may have a shot at winning it outright at the state convention. At any rate, the convention looks like it’ll be hotly contested, and one wonders whether Bennett can survive the primary even if he makes it through the convention; I wonder if the same thing happened in Utah last year (where Obama dramatically improved on Kerry’s numbers, albeit still losing badly) as in Pennsylvania, where a share of the moderates (who Bennett would need to win the primary) threw up their hands and became Dems, leaving behind a more purely distilled primary base.

It gets even more complicated than that, as two other Republican candidates are sniffing around the race: Tom Bridgewater, a former top McCain aide, also announced on Tuesday (by Twitter, natch), that he was going to drop his candidacy for state GOP chair and instead form an exploratory committee to run against Bennett. (Bridgewater failed in 2006 and 2008 to win the GOP primary for the right to lose to Jim Matheseon in UT-02; he’s also an investment partner of… get this… Neil Bush, the Bush brother who’s too corrupt to be a viable candidate for office.) Then there’s also David Leavitt, the former Juab County Attorney (and brother of former governor Mike Leavitt) who was talking up his candidacy for many months but hasn’t been heard from recently. (As first reported by Senate Guru, Dems have a viable, or at least well-known, candidate in the race, Sam Granato, the chair of the Utah Liquor Control Commission and owner of a deli chain.)

So, with the FL-Sen, MO-Sen, and KS-Sen 2010 primaries turning into establishment vs. movement conservative free-for-alls (and with the plug having been pulled on that same battle in PA-Sen), it looks like UT-Sen is turning into one more presto log on the hellfire as the GOP finally has its long-promised battle of Armageddon for the party’s heart and soul.

• IL-Sen: Tempted by Lisa Madigan’s titanic poll numbers against all comers, and her public statement of reconsidering the Senate race, the DSCC has started actively courting Madigan to get into the Senate race. This news comes from Madigan herself, who still maintains that her main focus is the governor’s race (but, if you read the fine print, seems to be firing warning shots across Chris Kennedy’s bow to keep him from jumping into the Senate race). Madigan’s interest can’t be good news for Alexi Giannoulias, especially as concerns over his handling of the state college savings program are taking a bit of the bloom off his rose.

• FL-Sen: Movement conservatives are tying themselves in knots trying to decide how to react to apostate Charlie Crist’s entry into the Senate race in Florida. The Club for Growth gave a tepid reaction, saying that Crist can still redeem himself by opposing the tax hikes proposed in the new state budget. On the other hand, Grover Norquist, the CfG’s patron saint, sounded a note of realpolitik, saying that Crist may be the best candidate “in Florida.” The conservative blogosphere, however, isn’t giving an inch, trying to organize a boycott on giving funds to the NRSC after John Cornyn weighed in on Crist’s behalf.

• MN-Sen: Norm Coleman is getting buried under legal bills, and not all of them are related to his tiresome contesting of Al Franken’s election. He just requested for FEC permission to start tapping his campaign funds for defense attorney fees related to allegations that sketchy Coleman benefactor Nasser Kazeminy was funneling payouts to Coleman through Coleman’s wife. Would GOP donors be willing to keep funding Coleman if they knew their donations were going to his defense attorneys and not the futile Franken fight? That hasn’t stopped Coleman’s Senate friends from continuing to solicit donations for him, as compiled in this video.

• MO-Sen: Rep. Roy Blunt pulled down a couple of expected but important endorsements in his quest to become Missouri’s next Senator: Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, the last member of Missouri’s House Republicans to get behind him, and Sen. Kit Bond, whose seat Blunt is looking to fill.

• OH-15: Ohio voters may get the chance to add even more Steves to their House delegation. Former GOP state Sen. Steve Stivers, who narrowly lost the open seat race in OH-15 to Mary Jo Kilroy last year, is contemplating another shot at the race, with lots of urging from John Boehner. (Ex-Rep. Steve Chabot is already committed to a rematch against Rep. Steve Driehaus in nearby OH-01.)

• SC-02: Speaking of rematches, backbench GOP Rep. Joe Wilson will have to face off again versus Iraq vet Rob Miller, who held Wilson to a surprising 54-46 margin in 2008 without DCCC help. Miller should be able to count on a higher-profile run this time.

• Mayors: City councilor Jim Suttle squeaked past Republican Hal Daub (former mayor and Representative) to hold the open Omaha mayor’s seat for Democrats. (The position is officially nonpartisan, but the race was fought along clearly partisan lines, which favored Suttle as Democrats hold a 44-33 registration edge within the city.) Suttle won by 1,500 votes, by a 51-49 margin.

In a statement:

Today, I’m announcing I will be a candidate for Governor of Florida in the November 2010 election, and put my business experience and know-how to work restoring our economy.

This is great news for Florida Dems – this seat instantly rockets to the top of our big-state pickup lists. As such, the Swing State Project is moving this from a Safe R “Race to Watch” to Tossup.

Democrats have scored a legit recruit to take on imperiled GOP Rep. Dan Lungren. From the Sacramento Bee:

Gary Davis, first-term city councilman for Elk Grove, said he will formally announce his candidacy today for the 3rd Congressional District seat held by Republican Rep. Dan Lungren of Gold River.

Davis, who served as Elk Grove mayor in 2008, led a push for greater citizen involvement in city decision-making after his election to the council in 2006.

As a Democrat, he must win in the 2010 California Democratic primary to face Lungren in the general election.

Davis said he began considering a run for the federal seat in mid-2008 after Lungren declined to transmit $11.6 million in funding requests from the city to the subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations for consideration. At the time, the congressman’s staff said it was determined that Elk Grove’s requests were not likely to win approval.

Davis said his final decision to run came in recent weeks after Lungren voted against a bill to authorize grant money to put more cops on the street.

He called running “the right thing to do.”

Lungren’s 3rd District, once a GOP bastion that went for Bush by 17 points in 2004, has seen some pretty dramatic demographic changes in recent years. Much of its new growth has come from minority demographics, and that sea change is making its mark on the district’s voter registration composition.

By the end of 2004, Republicans held a voter registration advantage of 169,464 to the Democrats’ 139,848 in the 3rd District. Since then, the district has both hemorrhaged Republicans and added Democrats to its voter rolls; while Republicans still outnumber Democrats here, the margin has been cut to 161K-153K. The cherry on top, of course, was Barack Obama’s slim win of the district’s presidential vote last November, while Lungren himself only won his race by 5.5% against Democrat Bill Durston (who has opted not to seek a rematch this cycle).

Davis will still have to prove that he’s got chops, but with a base in the district’s major population anchor, he looks good on paper — and the broader political winds appear set to give him a fighting chance in 2010.

And this is what Roll Call found:

Well, for starters, Ball was accused of stalking a former girlfriend, who got a temporary order of protection against him. He’s been accused of posting on the Web misleading photographs of an encampment of illegal immigrants in his legislative district. A dead goat was found recently in his front yard – the work, Ball believes, of Salvadoran gangs who oppose his tough anti-immigration stance – and he’s been sleeping with a 12-gauge shotgun under his bed ever since. And until recently he has been in a vicious blood feud with his political enemies – who by the way, happen to be fellow Republicans.

Oh yes, Ball was also accused of sexually harassing a former Assembly aide. Details of this are scant on the Web, but in his conversation with Roll Call, which borders on the surreal at times, Ball dutifully provides some. The woman, he says, was put up to it by the establishment Republicans who were waging jihad against him. And the bottom line, from his point of view, is that the Assembly Standing Committee on Ethics and Guidance “cleared” him.

Which is technically true. On Oct. 20, 2008, the committee issued a letter – which is available online – saying an investigation into the accusation found that a violation of the Assembly’s Sexual Harassment/Retaliation Policy “was not established.” The committee also makes it a point to say that the statute of limitations on the woman’s accusations had run out, so the Assembly couldn’t have taken any action anyway.

A clean exoneration? Ball likes to think so. Google him – and judge for yourself.

Maybe he should just shut up now.

Is state Sen. Dan Gelber considering bailing on the Democratic primary for Senate now that uber-popular Gov. Charlie Crist has made his candidacy official? The St. Pete Times has a teaser:

Certainly a lot of Florida Democrats want to avoid divisive primaries and Dan Gelber would be a natural candidate for attorney general, but the Miami Beach Democrat says he remains a U.S. Senate candidate, for now.

“I’m not shutting any doors,” he said about an A.G. run, which unlike the US Senate, would require him to resign his state senate job.

If Gelber, himself a former federal prosecutor, decides to run for state attorney general instead, he will likely face a competitive primary. Dave Aronberg, one of Gelber’s caucus-mates, says that he will run for the job if incumbent AG Bill McCollum (R) runs for Governor, which seems likely.

UPDATE: Perhaps surprisingly, Dem Rep. Ron Klein says that he’s not shutting any doors, either, on a Senate run.

A few months ago, this possibility seemed shocking, and nothing if not remote. But now it’s happened:

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced Tuesday morning he will run for U.S. Senate.

On his Twitter page, Crist wrote, “After thoughtful consideration with my wife Carole, I have decided to run for the U.S. Senate.”

Twitter – how cute. Quite unusually (but you can understand the motivation), John Cornyn and the NRSC instantly endorsed Crist. Conservative belle du jour Marco Rubio fired right back (also on Twitter! how savvy): “Disappointed GOP senate comm endorses Crist on day 1. Remember that reform must always come from the outside. Status quo won’t change itself.”

Rubio also released a new attack ad (not sure if it’s airing on TV, or if it’s just web fodder) linking Obama and Crist, with a photo showing them embracing. If Crist survives the primary, this tactic might wind up doing him a favor, assuming Obama is still popular in eighteen months from now. But the Republican contest ought to be a lot of fun no matter what.

In any event, with polling showing Crist far ahead in the GOP primary, the Swing State Project is changing its rating on FL-Sen from Tossup to Likely R – for now. It’s still early. We also anticipate changing our rating on the FL-Gov race soon, too.

 

• MO-Sen: Law professor Tom Schweich has publicly floated running for the Missouri GOP Senate nomination. Schweich used to be John Danforth’s chief of staff and was Ambassador for counternarcotics in Afghanistan in the Bush administration. Interestingly, the main motivation for his run that he’s putting out there is the fear (nay, likelihood) that Roy Blunt would lose the general election and that he (as sort of a Danforth proxy) offers a more appealing figure.

• VA-Gov: Former DNC chair Terry McAuliffe, who’s been demonstrating a lot of momentum in the polls lately, got another big boost: he picked up the endorsement of the SEIU today.

• NM-Gov: New Mexico’s only current statewide Republican elected official, Land Commissioner Pat Lyons, was a rumored gubernatorial candidate, especially since he’s term-limited out of his current job. In an indication of how popular the GOP brand is in New Mexico right now, Lyons decided to pass on the open seat race, instead running for an open position on New Mexico’s Public Regulation Commission.

• FL-Gov: I hadn’t even considered, with Charlie Crist bolting from Tallahassee, that Jeb! Bush might seek a return engagement as governor. After a Draft Jeb website popped up, Bush politely declined, saying that he will instead “continue to play a constructive role in the future of the Republican Party.”

• OH-Auditor: David Pepper (D), a Hamilton Co. Commissioner (and former Cinci Councilor/Cinci mayoral candidate who lost by a hair in 2005) is going to run against Ohio Auditor Mary Taylor (R). This is a crucial office because it controls a seat on the Ohio Reapportionment Board (which draws state legislative seats) and the GOP will be making a serious run at the open Secretary of State position that Jennifer Brunner is vacating (which also determines a seat on the board). Taylor says that she will announce whether she’ll run for re-election or in the GOP primary against Rob Portman for Senate later this week. (J)

• NH-01: Manchester mayor Frank Guinta has been acting like a candidate for a long time, but finally had his official kickoff event yesterday. Guinta hit every note in the libertarian book, singing the praises of tea baggers, criticizing the stimulus package, and saying that EFCA is “blatantly against” New Hampshire’s “live free or die” mentality.

• IL-06: Lost in the IL-Sen shuffle is Rep. Peter Roskam, who had occasionally been mentioned as a candidate for that (or governor). Roskam says it’s “increasingly less likely” that he’ll run for higher office, and seek to stay put instead.

• NRCC: The NRCC has launched a new wave of radio ads against theoretically vulnerable Dems in nine districts, still harping on the stimulus package, trying to tie them to John Murtha and his “airport for no one” (riffing on the “bridge to nowhere,” I suppose). Targets were Vic Snyder (AR-02), Mark Schauer (MI-07), Travis Childers (MS-01), Carol Shea-Porter (NH-01), Harry Teague (NM-02), Mike Arcuri (NY-24), Larry Kissell (NC-08), Kurt Schrader (OR-05), and Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (SD-AL).

• Mayors: Yet more mayoral elections in the news. Today, it’s Omaha, where there’s a faceoff between Democrat Jim Suttle and Republican Hal Daub (a former mayor and former Representative) to replaced retiring Dem mayor Mike Fahey. A recent poll had Daub up 42-39, but there may be a Democratic trend at work in Omaha (as seen in Obama’s victory in NE-02).

With Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announcing his candidacy for the U.S. Senate today, a lot of dominoes are set to fall in Florida over the coming weeks as lower-level officeholders seek to move up a rung or two on the good ol’ electoral ladder. One such drone who won’t be looking for a promotion is one Vernon G. Buchanan, according to the Bradenton Herald:

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s entry into the 2010 Senate race has prompted U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan to drop his senatorial aspirations and declare that he will seek re-election to his House seat instead.

“Representing Florida’s 13th district in the U.S. House is an honor and a privilege,” Buchanan said in a news release issued today. “I look forward to the opportunity to continue serving the people.”

Buchanan’s R-tilting seat likely would have hosted a competitive race without Buchanan on the ticket, but Democrats will have a tough time finding anyone of note to run against Vern now. One candidate who had been eyeing the race with the DCCC’s encouragement, state Rep. Keith Fitzgerald, recently said that he would probably not run for the seat if Buchanan didn’t scram.