Month: June 2010

PPP (pdf) (6/19-21, Pennsylvania voters, 3/29-4/1 in parens):

Dan Onorato (D): 35 (32)

Tom Corbett (R): 45 (45)

Undecided: 20 (23)

(MoE: ±4%)

Yesterday’s release from PPP of their gubernatorial numbers aren’t quite the good news that their Senate numbers were (which saw Joe Sestak consolidating Democrats post-primary, and shooting up into a tie with Pat Toomey). While Republican AG Tom Corbett is flat, Democrat Dan Onorato (the Allegheny Co. Executive) didn’t seem to capture as much of the unity bounce as did Sestak; he only rose three points. (Bear in mind that this is the same sample that broke 48 McCain/47 Obama.)

If there’s good news here, it’s that Democrats and liberals are noticeably more heavily undecided than Republicans and conservatives. Dems are 22% undecided (and breaking 57-21 for Onorato) while GOPers are 14% undecided (and breaking 74-12 for Corbett). But we’re getting to the point where Onorato needs to not just nail down the undecided Dems but also flip some of the Dems who are going for Corbett. As I’ve bemoaned before, though, he’s up against two problems; one is his near-Some Dude-ness in the face of Corbett’s high profile (not just because of his statewide office but because of his Bonusgate prosecutions), and two is Pennsylvania’s clockwork eight-year alternation between parties for Governor.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Kratovil’s chances lately, since I have been represented by Andy Harris in the State Senate for the past 8 years and really cringe at the idea of him becoming a congressman and embarrassing the hell out of my home state, so I decided to do a little bit of analysis concerning Kratovil’s 2008 win to see if the conventional wisdom held true.

The conventional wisdom of the race is that Harris lost because, while running up big margins in his home in the Baltimore suburbs on the Western Shore, he could not overcome Kratovil’s margins on the Eastern Shore. Indeed, Kratovil did run a region-specific campaign against Harris, and did win all of the Eastern Shore counties while losing all of the Western Shore counties, but I’ve found that this obscures a few key facts.

First of all, Kratovil improved on Obama’s margins in EVERY part of the district; some more than others, yes, but overall Harris was such a bad candidate that he even underperformed McCain in the parts of Baltimore and Harford counties that he has represented for the past 8 years.

Second of all, the shifts on the shore were not all even. Kratovil overperformed Obama more in some counties than others. I decided to do a regression in Excel to see to what extent the variance of Kratovil’s numbers coincided with the variance in Obama’s numbers.

Here is a graph that plots the percentages with a regression line and equation:

Here is the data chart, with Kratovil’s percentage as predicted by the model from the regression line, and the difference between the predicted and actual results (highlighted in yellow are the counties where Kratovil overperformed his across-the-board shift):

As you can see from the r-squared value, the line fits the data about 75% of the time (which I’ve been told by professors is considered high for political research). Additionally, I found the correlation to be 85%, meaning that 85% of the time, the relative variance of Kratovil’s numbers can be explained by the relative variance of Obama’s numbers. This is very high, and although the same might be true of almost any politician (including people like Chet Edwards), the fact that it is so high shows that what we saw was more of an across-the-board rejection of Harris and less of a region-specific phenomenon (which would show less correlation due to a lot of overperformance in one area and underperformance in another). In fact, if you look closely at the toplines, you can see that many of the counties that Kratovil did win actually had less distance to go in voting Democratic than did the counties that he lost. Overall, the Western Shore counties are just a great deal more Republican than the Eastern Shore counties.

In most counties, Kratovil actually underperformed his across-the-board 10% shift, but the one region where he really overperformed his shift was in the upper Eastern Shore (Queen Anne’s County, Kent County, and Caroline County). This make sense, as Kratovil is from this region.

Additionally, he underperformed his across-the-board 10% shift somewhat on the Western Shore (as to be expected), but not nearly as much as one would expect. (I am including Cecil County as Western Shore just to clarify)

On the lower eastern shore, Kratovil performed at about his overall shift for the whole district. So to recap, Kratovil improved over Obama everywhere, improving the most in the Upper Shore, the least on the Western Shore, and at about his average improvement in the Lower Shore.

All of this underscores how delicate Kratovil’s position really is. If the number of voters willing to vote for Obama drops below 39%, then Kratovil is toast unless he overperforms by more than he did last time. He additionally cannot get too comfortable with the idea that he won based on an Eastern Shore-based coalition, since he actually picked up a lot of votes on the Western Shore as well.

To win, Kratovil needs to:

-Not allow Harris to gain any ground on the Western Shore over what he got last time. Basically, he needs to hold the same margins, since he is unlikely to go up any further here (although winning Anne Arundel is a possibility)

-Keep his unusually high margins on the Upper Shore that are unlikely to go up much more.

-Overperform his last election numbers on the Lower Eastern Shore for some insurance. I feel that he could do this if he gets voters in this area to really think of him as their own even more than they already have (more like the voters in the Upper Shore have).

As a bonus, I’ve included a map showing the percentage of voters who live in each part of the district.

Let me know what you think.

Passing along this great program from the National Stonewall Democrats. It is great to see NSD come out with such a strong program supporting so many races.

After a month of voting and 50,000 votes cast, Stonewall Democrats have their final ElectEquality candidates! They are Tim Bishop, David Cicililne, Scott Galvin, Alexi Giannoulias, Paul Hodes, Rush Holt, Kendrick Meek, Patrick Murphy, Ed Potosnak, Steve Pougnet, Carol Shea-Porter and Dina Titus.

You may have noticed that instead of the ten candidates they are throwing our weight behind twelve ElectEquality candidates. The board of directors of National Stonewall Democrats PAC was blown away by the overwhelming support each of these candidates received — and by how tight the race was — and simply couldn’t cull the list down to ten.

Now that selecting the candidates is done, it’s time to take out all the stops and throw our unequivocal support behind each and every one of them  at http://www.actblue.com/page/el…

The fate of pro-equality legislation in the Congress depends entirely on who we elect this fall. Don’t miss this opportunity to do what you can to support the ElectEquality candidates.

It is being reported on Tennessee’s leading statewide political news aggregate/blog, Post Politics (Tennessee Post), that a leading Republican candidate for the 8th Congressional District, Stephen Fincher, voted in the May 5, 2010 Democratic Primary. The May primary in Tennessee is for local county office holders, and in the case of Fincher’s rural Crockett County, the Democratic Primary is still the only primary held. This move still has to raise concerns with the die-hard Republican faithful as to why he did not simply abstain from voting in the primary altogether. This latest primary vote also raises questions if he meets the standards of the Republican Party by-laws to run as a candidate in a Republican Primary, as his primary voting record is overwhelmingly in Democratic Primaries when he takes the time to vote in them.

Link: http://politics.nashvillepost….

The 8th District has seen an unprecedented ad blitz by the top 3 Republican Primary candidates: Dr. George Flinn (Memphis), Dr. Ron Kirkland (Jackson), and Stephen Fincher (Frog Jump/Halls/W. Maury City/Crockett County/?), in which Fincher has been the first to go hard negative; and exclusively against Kirkland. Fincher’s attack ads depict Kirkland as a RINO whose medical PAC supports liberal Democrats in Washington, who personally supported Tanner and other local conservative Dems in the past, and is willing to do the apparently un-Republican action of working across party lines to pass legislation. Now with the revelation of Fincher having yet again voted in a Democratic Primary, during the campaign no less, it has to open his campaign up to accusations of hypocrisy. It is to be expected that Fincher will explain this away as wanting to have a voice in local politics; but that will only dig his hole deeper, as that is clearly the reasoning behind Kirkland’s support for local Dems and for his medical PAC’s support of key Washington Democrats.

State Senator Roy Herron (D-Dresden), the conservative Democratic nominee in waiting, has to be enjoying the increasingly divisive and fractious Republican Primary, as his campaign will be eager to attempt to attract disillusioned Rs, see them go to the Tea Party-ish independent, Don Janes, or see them simply skip the ballot line in fall. George Flinn, the 3rd man in the Republican Primary, may also see benefit in his potential role as spoiler/dark-horse candidate, as his campaign has relentlessly focused on job creation, a theme that plays extremely well with voters; unfortunately he actually lives in the 9th District (Memphis) and is relatively unknown in the rural 8th outside of his extensive media campaign.

This has to be one of the most interesting primaries going on currently, and chocked full of weird twists and turns the national media should be eating up.

• AZ-Sen (pdf): Magellan is out with a poll of the Republican Senate primary, and finds (everybody say it with me now… 3… 2… 1…) good news! for John McCain! McCain leads J.D. Hayworth 52-29. The sample was taken on Tuesday, post-reveal of Hayworth’s Matthew Lesko-style free-money shilling.

• CO-Sen: Americans for Job Security, the mysterious conservative group who poured a lot of money into anti-Bill Halter ads in the Arkansas primary, have surfaced again, and this time they’re actually pro- somebody. They’re up with ads in Colorado pushing Weld Co. Ken Buck, who’s poised to knock off NRSC-touted Jane Norton in the GOP Senate primary.

• FL-Sen: An important-sounding behind-the-scenes Democrat has gotten on board the Charlie Crist campaign. Jeff Lieser, who was the finance director for Alex Sink’s successful 2006 CFO campaign, is going to be heading up Crist’s “Democratic fundraising efforts.”

• MO-Sen: Barack Obama will be doing a fundraiser with Robin Carnahan in Kansas City on July 8. Carnahan hid under a pile of coats when Obama was in Missouri last winter, so it’s good to see her changing her tune.

• AL-Gov: Robert Bentley, the state legislator who surprised many by squeaking into the GOP gubernatorial runoff, is picking up a key Tim James backer. Ex-Rep. Sonny Callahan, who represented AL-01 for decades, switched his backing to Bentley yesterday.

• AZ-Gov: The NRA really does seem to love its incumbents, as they’ve often been accused. The NRA weighed in to the GOP gubernatorial primary, endorsing appointed incumbent Jan Brewer. The only reason that’s a surprise is because her biggest rival is self-funding businessman Owen Buz Mills, who also happens to be on the NRA’s board of directors and who owns a shooting range.

• IA-Gov: Terry Branstad went with a relative unknown for his running mate, state Sen. Kim Reynolds, rather than one of the parade of recent losers whose names had been floated (Jeff Lamberti, Jim Gibbons, Rod Roberts). Perhaps most significantly, he didn’t pick GOP primary runner-up and social conservative extraordinaire Bob Vander Plaats, so now all eyes are on BVP to see whether he follows through with vague threats to run an independent candidacy. (While socially conservative personally, Reynolds isn’t known for running with the social conservative crowd.)

• MI-Gov: Virg Bernero is pretty universally considered the “labor” candidate in the Dem primary in the Michigan governor’s race, but rival Andy Dillon just got the backing of a big-time union: the statewide Teamsters. Bernero has the backing of the AFL-CIO (which, significantly for Michigan, includes the UAW); while they aren’t hitting the airwaves on Bernero’s behalf (at least not yet), they are gearing up for a large ground campaign.

• OR-Gov, OR-Sen: It looks like the Oregon gubernatorial race is going to be a close one (like New Mexico, this is shaping up to be a situation where what seemed like an easy race is turning into a battle because the outgoing Dem incumbent’s unpopularity is rubbing off on the expected successor). Local pollsters Davis, Hibbitts, and Midghall, on behalf of the Portland Tribune, find the race a dead heat, at a 41-41 tie between John Kitzhaber and Chris Dudley (with 6 going to minor party candidates). Tim Hibbitts is the go-to pollster in Oregon; the upside, I suppose, is that it’s good for Dems to realize now they’re going to need to fight this one hard, rather than realizing it in October after months of complacency. While the Gov. numbers here are closely in line with Rasmussen, the Senate numbers certainly aren’t: they find Ron Wyden leading Jim Huffman by a much more comfortable margin of 50-32.

• TX-Gov: Bill White got a big endorsement from Bill Clinton (although there’s no word yet if Clinton will stump in Texas on White’s behalf, which would be huge). Former Houston mayor White was also a Dept. of Energy official in the Clinton administration.

• LA-02: You might recall some sketchily-sourced information from a few days ago that a couple Democrats were considering launching independent bids in the 2nd, where a high-profile spoiler may be the only hope for another term for GOP freshman Rep. Joe Cao. Well, it seems like there’s some truth to the story, inasmuch as the person most likely to be affected by that, state Rep. Cedric Richmond (the likeliest Dem nominee here), is calling attention to the situation now. He’s accusing Republicans of a “South Carolina-style political ploy by convincing black candidates to run as independents.”

• MI-07: Although ex-Rep. Tim Walberg has the social conservative cred by the bushelful, he didn’t get an endorsement from Catholic Families for America. They instead backed his GOP primary rival, Brian Rooney. The Rooney backing makes sense, though, when you recall that Rooney is an attorney for the Thomas More Law Center, the Michigan-based nonprofit that’s a frequent filer of amicus briefs and bills itself as “Christianity’s answer to the ACLU.” The Center was founded by Domino’s Pizza baron Tom Monaghan, whose other attempts to mix ultra-conservative Catholicism and the law have included Ave Maria School of Law.

• WATN?: I had absolutely no idea that retiring Rep. Henry Brown was actually interested in demoting himself instead of leaving the political game altogether, but it turns out that, rather than take up golf or shuffleboard like a normal 74-year-old, he decided to run for the Board of Supervisors in Berkeley County (in Charleston’s suburbs). Here’s where it gets really pathetic… he didn’t even win that race. He got 44% of the vote on Tuesday in the GOP runoff (although in his sort-of defense, he was running against an incumbent).

• History: Here’s a very interesting article from Larry Sabato’s henchman Rhodes Cook, on why 2010 won’t be 1994. His gradation of “blue,” “purple,” and “red” districts is a little reductive, but it’s a nice look at how Democrats have somewhat less exposure in general this year. And if you’re looking for some amusing trivia, Univ. of Minnesota’s Smart Politics has a captivating look at which states have the most (South Carolina) and the fewest (Alaska by #, Idaho by %) governors who were born in-state.

Netroots Nation: James, Crisitunity, and I will all be doing a Q&A panel on the 2010 elections at Netroots Nation, along with the horserace folks at Daily Kos. So if you were on the fence about coming to the annual online progressive confab, now you have no excuse to miss it! Also, the special hotel rate for the convention is only available through Monday, June 28th, so book now.

CA-Sen: To give you a sense of how meaningless most of Moose Lady’s endorsements are, she’s visiting California this week, but isn’t doing any events with Mama Grizz Carly. (BTW, would this make Todd “Baby Daddy Grizzly”?)

IA-Gov: Bob Vander Plaats will go on a local radio show either tonight or tomorrow (it’s not clear), the first time he’ll be speaking in public since losing the gubernatorial primary. Cat fud lovers (such as myself) are, of course, hoping he’ll announce plans to run as an independent.

MI-Gov: There is some crazy-ass shit going on in the Michigan gubernatorial primary. AG Mike Cox is claiming that four unaired TV ads were “stolen” from his campaign and uploaded by parties unknown to YouTube. They’ve since been taken down, but accounts of them indicate that they were designed to push back against mysterious anti-Cox radio ads that resurfaced recently, alleging that Cox helped cover up an out-of-control party at the Detroit mayor’s mansion in 2002, which helped lead to the downfall of then-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. (Incidentally, Kilpatrick – who is currently in jail – was just indicted on another 19 fraud-related counts yesterday.)

MA-10: Former Quincy, Mass. mayor and former Democrat James Sheets says he’s going to run as an independent for the seat left open by retiring Rep. Bill Delahunt. Sheets must figure that Tim Cahill’s less-than-glorious Dem-turned-indie run for governor doesn’t hold any lessons for him. In any case, Sheets is not exactly a fresh face – he’s 74, and served as mayor for six terms, before getting turfed almost a decade ago. Still, this probably doesn’t help Democrats.

MD-01: Been a while since we saw one of these: A Democratic incumbent releasing an internal showing him in the lead. A Garin-Hart-Yang poll has Rep. Frank Kratovil up 44-39 over retread Andy Harris. And as the WaPo reminds us, Harris doesn’t have the GOP primary to himself: richie rich Rob Fisher is already on the air with TV ads and pledges to stay up through the September primary.

NY-13: Wow – all that sturm and drang ends with a whimper. Stephen Harrison, the 2006 Dem nominee for the 13th CD, had made some noise several months ago about challenging Rep. Mike McMahon in the primary (as he had in 2008) after the incumbent voted against healthcare reform. But now Harrison has endorsed McMahon, all but ensuring the only real fight here will be in November.

Meanwhile, on the GOP side, Michael Allegretti told Politico in an interview that he considers Vito Fossella a “good example for anyone aspiring to office on Staten Island and Brooklyn.” There’s some weird tribal/cultural thing going on in this race, and I just don’t get why the Staten Island Republican establishment has such a fetish for a guy with multiple families and a drunk-driving conviction. Michael Grimm seems like a perfectly good candidate, yet it’s almost like professing loyalty to Fossella is a litmus test here. So very strange.

NY-20: Scott Murphy secured the backing of the Working Families Party, which means he’ll have their ballot line in November. He previously won the Independence Party’s endorsement, so he’ll be on three different ballot lines this fall (Rows A, C, and E). Recall that in last year’s special election, Murphy won by just 726 votes – but took 3,839 votes on the WFP line.

CA-SD-15: It turns out there might not be a runoff for this seat after all. Republican Sam Blakeslee’s election-night vote count stood at 49.7%, just shy of the 50%+1 needed to win the seat outright. He may yet do that, since there are some 15,000 uncounted mail-in ballots, and apparently most of them are in GOP-friendly territory.

Club for Growth: John McArdle in CQ notes that the Club for Growth has been celebrating their recent string of primary successes – but also notes that the group is taking a more “Republican-friendly” approach this cycle by targeting only GOP-held open seats. “Moderate” Rep. Steve LaTourette is a bit happier with this approach, but says: “If we secure the majority in November I’m sure we can get back to the Spanish Inquisition and continue purging our party by fire.” Failed ex-NRCC chair Tom Cole, meanwhile, is delighted that the Club’s influence is still helping to sabotage his party, saying: “Members realize they have to be much more consistently conservative then they have been in the past and that’s a good thing.”

Last fall, in exposing sockpuppetry by Andrew Eldredge-Martin, the campaign manager for Doug Pike, I wrote:

Every community, it goes without saying, is built on trust – and nowhere is this more true than online. In the digital realm, where you can’t see and seldom know the people you’re interacting with, being able to trust the folks on the other end of the line is of the utmost importance. We need to know, as best we are able, that people are who they say they are, that they mean what they say, and that they have the community’s best interests at heart.

Conversely, pretense, hidden agendas, and fabrications can do great damage to a place like this. Without a basic level of trust, an online community loses its credibility, its cohesiveness, and its influence. Both the administrators and the users of this site understand this well, and it’s why we all spend as much time as we do trying hard to preserve the trust we’ve built here.

Because of this fundamental need to maintain trust, in the political blogosphere, we hold campaigns to the highest of standards.

We have also repeatedly explained that campaign staff, paid or unpaid, have a duty to disclose their campaign connections if they comment or diary here.

The clarity with which we have repeatedly made this standard clear is one of many reasons it is distressing to uncover yet another example of a campaign staffer sockpuppeting in support of his candidate. But this latest case represents an even greater transgression of blogospheric standards because this violator is also a blogger who should be well aware of the rules and have added respect for their importance.

Blogging as Senate Guru, Mat Helman has been a diarist at Daily Kos and the Swing State Project and maintained his own blog for several years. He is also a political operative and has worked on several campaigns. Until recently, he kept a careful distinction between his work and his blogging. Unfortunately, he stepped over the line, badly.

First, he created and began using a new account, MassDemActivist, to diary at both Daily Kos and Swing State Project while he was still actively using the Senate Guru account. While abandoning one account and permanently moving to another is acceptable, usage of the accounts must not overlap.

Second, two of the three diaries posted under the MassDemActivist account promoted Mac D’Alessandro, a candidate primarying Stephen Lynch (MA-09), without disclosing that the diarist was a high-level volunteer anticipating future paid work with the campaign. These diaries were also critical of Lynch, and attacking an opponent under cover of a sockpuppet is one of the most unacceptable things you can do in the blogosphere.

We confronted Mat and offered him the opportunity to make his own apology in the diaries. Unfortunately, while he acknowledged his actions, the apology diary he drafted was inadequate. To his credit, he wrote:

For what it’s worth, the campaign had no knowledge of my blogging – this was all on me.  Again, as a citizen of the blogosphere, I should have recognized that any relationship should have been clearly and explicitly disclosed, and not doing so was simply poor judgment in a haste to get information out to the blogosphere.  Again, it was simply boneheaded, and I apologize.

But in other ways he attempted to disclaim the implications of his actions. For that reason, having first given him the chance to speak for himself, we are making his deception public.

Again, as I said in uncovering Andrew Eldredge-Martin’s sockpuppeting:

This should also be a lesson to anyone – and to any campaign – contemplating something similar. We will remain eternally vigilant in policing this site. We will not tolerate this kind of behavior. And we will do everything in our power to ensure that the trust which animates this site remains unbroken.

• KY-Sen: The Louisville Courier-Journal has something of a compendium of Rand Paul’s Greatest Hits, selecting the dodgiest bits from his public appearances from the last decade. While the whole thing’s worth a look, the highlight most likely to attract the most attention is his criticisms of the current health care system and how it “keeps patients from negotiating lower prices with their doctors.” Bwack bwack bwack bwack bwack bwack…

• LA-Sen: A key David Vitter aide has resigned after his long rap sheet was revealed, perhaps most significantly that he pled guilty in 2008 to charges associated with a “knife-wielding altercation” with an ex-girlfriend, as well as that he’s still wanted on an open warrant in Baton Rouge on DWI charges. Perhaps most disturbingly, this was an aide that Vitter had been assigned to “oversee women’s issues.”

• MO-Sen: I’ll bet you’d forgotten that Roy Blunt had a teabagging primary challenger, in the form of state Sen. Roy Purgason (I had). Well, Purgason wants you to know that, despite complete silence from the DeMint/RedState/CfG/FreedomWorks axis, he’s still hanging in there; he just rolled out an endorsement from one of his Senate colleagues, Matt Bartle.

• NV-Sen: Well, this doesn’t look good for John Ensign. Staffers, in depositions, have told the Senate Ethics Committee that, yes, they knew that the one-year lobbying ban was being broken when they helped set up former Ensign staffer and cuckolded husband Doug Hampton with a cushy lobbying gig.

• NY-Sen-B: After Quinnipiac didn’t even bother polling him this week, Joe DioGuardi (who holds the Conservative ballot line and its trying to petition into the GOP primary) wants you to know he’s still in this thing. He released an internal poll from the ubiquitous POS showing that he’s within 11 points of Kirsten Gillibrand (49-38), and, more plausibly, that he has a big edge in the GOP primary, at 21 against Bruce Blakeman’s 7 and David Malpass at 3.

• OR-Sen: Rasmussen has been working hard to convince people that there just might be a competitive race in Oregon for Ron Wyden, against little-known law professor Jim Huffman. Looking to head that off at the pass, Wyden rolled out an internal poll today from Grove Insight that should be a bucket of cold water for the Huffman camp: Wyden leads 53-23.

• CA-Gov: I’m not sure how much of this is Politico just, as is its wont, looking for drama where there isn’t much, and how much of this is genuine discontent. But they have an article today about an increasing sense among Dem insiders of wondering when Jerry Brown is going to drop the Zen approach and, if not attack Meg Whitman, at least work on some of the infrastructural aspects of the campaign.

• CT-Gov: Ned Lamont got a key labor endorsement, from the state’s largest teachers’ union, the Connecticut Education Association. Lamont and Dan Malloy have split the endorsements from the various trade unions. Meanwhile, on the GOP side, Tom Foley got an endorsement that may help him with that all-important demographic bloc of Massachusetts expatriates; ex-Gov. William Weld gave Foley his backing.

• MI-Gov: Peter Hoekstra got an endorsement from his next-door neighbor in the House, outgoing (and considerably more moderate) Rep. Vern Ehlers, who had earlier said he wouldn’t endorse but qualified that by saying “If there is an exceptional candidate that appears to be lagging” he’d endorse. Hoekstra in fact does seem to be lagging, facing a seeming surge from AG Mike Cox in the GOP gubernatorial primary.

• MN-Gov: This seems odd; when she pulled the plug on her campaign after the DFL convention, Ramsey Co. DA Susan Gaertner said she didn’t want to get in the way of the historic prospect of a female governor and didn’t want to be a spoiler for Margaret Anderson Kelliher. So what did she do today? She endorsed Matt Entenza in the DFL primary instead.

• NM-Gov (pdf): Magellan (a Republican pollster, but one who’ve started releasing a lot of polls where they don’t have a candidate) is out with a poll of the New Mexico governor’s race, and like several other pollsters are finding the Diane Denish/Susana Martinez race to be in tossup territory. They find the Republican Martinez leading Denish 44-43. There’s a huge gender gap here: women support Denish 48-36, while men support Martinez 53-36. One other item from the crosstabs, which either casts some doubt on the findings or else is the key to why Martinez may win this: while Martinez is losing in Albuquerque-based NM-01, she’s actually winning in NM-03 (45-41), the most liberal of the state’s three districts but also the most-heavily Latino.

• AL-07: Local African-American organizations (the same ones who threw their backing to Ron Sparks in the gubernatorial primary) seem split on what do to in the runoff in the 7th. The Alabama New South Coalition (who’d backed Earl Hilliard Jr. in the primary) has now endorsed Terri Sewell, while the Alabama Democratic Conference is backing Shelia Smoot.

• OH-05: Rep. Bob Latta languishes as one of the GOP’s most obscure back-benchers, but he’s in the news because of two different things that happened at a town hall meeting. First, he went birther-agnostic at the meeting in response to a participant’s questions, only to try to walk that back later when talking to a reporter. And second, he didn’t immediately respond to another participant’s suggestion that the President be “shot in the head.”

• OK-02: State Sen. Jim Wilson is challenging Rep. Dan Boren in the Democratic primary in the 2nd; he’s out with an internal poll from Lake Research with a dismal topline (Boren leads 62-17) but with better numbers on the “informed ballot.” The topline numbers aren’t that different from Boren‘s own internal poll released last week. Still, between Boren releasing an internal, airing an anti-Wilson ad, and rolling out an endorsement from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, it’s clear Boren is taking the threat seriously.

• Census: The Census Bureau is out this week with its 2009 population estimates of the nation’s cities, the last estimate it’ll provide before releasing the numbers from the actual 2010 count. Perhaps most notably, they found the population of New York City is up another 45,000 over the last year. NYC’s growth over the last decade accounts for two-thirds of the state’s population growth over the last decade; as we’ve discussed before, this means that in the next round of redistricting (Congressional, but especially legislative) the city is going to continue to gain strength at the expense of dwindling Upstate.

A relatively quiet night, but one deserving of a roundup nonetheless.

North Carolina:

• NC-Sen (D): It’s been a long six weeks since the first round, where Elaine Marshall narrowly missed the threshold for a runoff by 4% with 36%. She picked up the endorsement of third-place finisher Ken Lewis (who scored 17%) in the meantime, countering the almost $200,000 put in on Cal Cunningham’s behalf by the DSCC. The DSCC’s efforts were again futile, with Marshall scoring a 60-40 victory. Given that Marshall won 57% of the head-to-head vote against Cuninngham in Round 1, this represents a 3% swing in her direction. DSCC Chair Bob Menendez put out a short statement in support of Marshall, who now goes on to face Richard Burr for the “cursed” seat that switches party every 6 years. (JMD)
• NC-08 (R): It looks like D’Annunziana Jones can spend more time busting the Ark of the Covenant out of Area 51. Ex-broadcaster Harold Johnson beat the enriched plutonium-level crazy Tim D’Annunzio by a 61-39 margin despite being badly out-spent. This one will probably end up being a real race this fall, despite D’Annunzio’s refusal to congratulate or endorse Johnson. (JL)

South Carolina:

• SC-Gov (R): Nikki Haley narrowly missed avoiding a runoff two weeks ago with 49%, but she sealed the deal with a convincing 65-35 victory over Gresham Barrett, who received 22%. Barrett’s dog-whistling attempts – referring to himself as a Christian family man who “won’t embarrass us” – didn’t seem to work, only carrying three counties within his district. The result falls surprisingly along the fault lines from the first round – AG Henry McMaster, who received 17% threw his support to Haley, while LG Andre Bauer threw his 12% to Barrett. Haley will now face Democratic State Senator Vincent Sheheen. (JMD)
• SC-01 (R): State Rep. Tim Scott is set to become the GOP’s first African-American congressman since J.C. Watts, much to the relief of John Boehner and Scott’s backers at the Club for Growth. Scott crushed attorney Paul Thurmond (the son of Strom) by a monstrous 68-32 margin, and faces a sub-par Democratic opponent in November. (JL)
• SC-03 (R): The Club for Growth had a much closer shave in this district, where their preferred candidate, state Rep. Jeff Duncan, only beat  the underfunded Richard Cash, an owner/operator of a fleet of ice cream trucks, by a 51-49 margin. Duncan will be the heavy favorite to win this 64% McCain in the general election. (JL)
• SC-04 (R): Wow, what a pathetic loss. Incumbent Rep. Bob Inglis barely moved the needle from his 28% primary performance, finishing the night with just 29% of the vote to Spartanburg County Solicitor Trey Gowdy’s whopping 71%. I wonder if we’ll ever see what Bob Inglis 3.0 looks like. (JL)

Utah:

• UT-Sen (R): Tim Bridgewater had a 57-43 advantage in the third round of balloting at Utah’s state GOP convention, but that didn’t hold over into the primary. Tim Bridgewater was viewed as the favorite and was up in the one public poll of the race (Mike Lee was up in his internals), but Lee (the son of Reagan’s solicitor general Rex) pulled out a narrow 51-49 victory over Bridgewater. Bridgewater had a narrow advantage along the heavily-populated Wasatch Front, but Lee more than offset this with his strength in Washington County (St. George) and the sparsely populated areas in between. (JMD)
• UT-02 (D): Democrats had worried about some GOP involvement to bounce the moderate (and more electable) Jim Matheson by pushing for liberal activist and school teacher Claudia Wright but Matheson cruised to a 68-32 victory. Wright had denied Matheson the outright nod at the Democratic convention – presumably due to his ‘no’ vote on HCR – netting 45% of delegates, but among the wider primary electorate, she didn’t fare as well. Matheson goes on to face former Southern SLCo State Rep. Morgan Philpot in his bid for a sixth term. (JMD)
  

Bonus Race: California!

• CA SD-15 (special): California’s 15th Senate district may get my vote for the nation’s most beautiful legislative district, but the results here weren’t too pretty. In a district that’s D+5 at the presidential level, Republican state Assembly minority leader Sam Blakeslee finished ahead of Democratic ex-Assemblyman John Laird, 50-41. However, California special election law requires one to break 50% to avoid a runoff, and Blakeslee’s 49.7% wasn’t enough. So, all four candidates (including a Libertarian and an indie) will do the exact same thing again on Aug. 17, although tonight’s results don’t bode well for Laird turning things around during the replay. (C)