Tag: John Ensign

• AK-Sen: Is there anyone other than Joe Miller left who wants Joe Miller to keep contesting the Senate race? The state GOP organization is now saying it “stands ready to embrace Lisa Murkowski” as the winner of the race, despite her not having won its primary. I’m sure they were secretly ready all along to do so… recall that the person issuing the statement, state party chair Randy Ruedrich, was the guy that Joe Miller was trying to orchestrate a palace coup against, which got him fired from his Fairbanks borough job. I can’t imagine much love lost between Ruedrich and Miller.

• IN-Sen: Richard Lugar, who just announced that he’s running for re-election, is laying down a pretty big marker (and one that probably helped convince him to run again). He’s out with an internal poll from American Viewpoint that, while it doesn’t specifically poll the 2012 GOP Senate primary, shows him with huge approvals, though apparently among all voters and not just registered Republicans. He’s at 66% favorable. Two of his potential GOP opponents, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock and state Sen. Mike Delph, have faves of 14% and 7% each.

• ND-Sen, NM-Sen: This Politico article doesn’t actually contain any hard facts that are newsworthy, but it does contain one alarming sentence, that both Kent Conrad and Jeff Bingaman are “weighing retirement” (without anything beyond that). Conrad and Bingaman, though both long-timers, are still in their early 60s. Buried deep in the article is also a throwaway line that Jon Kyl is also the subject of retirement “speculation.”

• NJ-Sen: That tea party push to have a recall election for Bob Menendez (despite, of course, the universally accepted legal principle that you can’t recall federal officials) seems to have finally died, courtesy of the New Jersey Supreme Court. I’m just surprised the case rose that far through the courts before, y’know, someone thought to crack open their 1L Con Law textbook, but the bright side is that every dollar right-wingers spend on pointless appellate legal fees is a dollar not spent on actually electing somebody. Menendez is up for a regularly scheduled election in 2012, anyway.

• NV-Sen: Everyone seems in a fit of instant nostalgia for Sharron Angle today, with the revelation that in the course of the campaign she said “Sometimes dictators have good ideas” (in reference to Augusto Pinochet and privatized pension systems), and the leaked release of the ad that she cut that never got released, probably because it takes a minute to make a point that should take five seconds and because the 70s-disaster-flick-style overacting overshadows any possible message. (You can click here to see the ad, bearing in mind that it opens in Windows Media Player.) The real news that got leaked today that might impact the 2012 race, though, is that none other than John Ensign helped Sharron Angle prep for her debate by playing the part of Harry Reid. I wonder if that’ll be the last nail in the coffin for the reputed Reid/Ensign non-aggression pact?

• RI-Sen: Add one more potential name to the roster for a Republican challenger to Sheldon Whitehouse: the state’s GOP chair, Giovanni Cicione (who has been encouraging outgoing Gov. Don Carcieri to run, as well as floating his own name as a last resort), is touting John Robitaille as a possible candidate. Robitaille (Carcieri’s former communications director) performed above expectations in the gubernatorial race in which he was supposed to be a sacrificial lamb, finishing second (though helped along by Frank Caprio’s last-minute implosion).

• VA-Sen (pdf): PPP’s Virginia Senate poll had a GOP primary portion that just got released separately; right now, George Allen is the consensus pick, although that may have more to do with the ex-Gov. and ex-Sen.’s broad name rec compared with the rest of the field. Allen is at 46, with the very-unlikely-to-run Eric Cantor at 18, right-wing AG Ken Cuccinelli at 16, Lt. Gov. Bill Boling and ex-Rep. Tom Davis both at 4, and state Del. Bob Marshall (who almost sneaked into the 2008 Senate nomination) at 2.

• NY-01, NY-25: Good news in the 1st, bad news in the 25th. Tim Bishop has made up some ground, as of the second day of absentee counting. Bishop picked up 108 votes on Randy Altschuler, cutting Altschuler’s lead down to 275, and that’s with Smithtown, Altschuler’s strongest area, having almost entirely reported. Bishop’s strongest turf is East Hampton, which will begin counting tomorrow. Ann Marie Buerkle, however, gained a small amount of ground in the 25th, contrary to expectations. Her lead is up to 824 votes, after a batch of small batch (230) of challenged ballots from Monroe County got opened and counted. The county to watch, though, will be Onondaga County, which is Dan Maffei’s base and where 7,000 absentees are yet to be counted.

• Redistricting: There are three different redistricting articles out today that are worth a read. One is about Texas, where it seems like the GOP is extended about as far as it can go (thanks to victories in TX-23 and likely TX-27); compounding the problem there is something that I’ve been pointing out for years, which is that at least two, possibly three, of its expected four new seats are going to have to be VRA seats, seeing as how the vast majority of Texas’s growth in the past decade has been among Hispanics. Trying to limit the creation of new Hispanic-majority seats will only make it harder to protect Quico Canseco and Blake Farenthold.

There’s also a piece looking at Nevada, more specifically the fight within the Dem-controlled legislature about for whom to tailor NV-04 (which will probably be a Dem-leaning suburban district, conceding a GOP-leaning NV-03 to Joe Heck). Both state Senate majority leader Steven Horsford and new state Assembly speaker John Oceguera have their eyes on the new seat. Finally, there are questions in Florida about just who’s behind the lawsuit, fronted by a bipartisan coalition of Mario Diaz-Balart and Corrine Brown, to stop implementation of Amendment 6, the one bright spot from Florida on Election Day (a new initiative that makes gerrymandering more difficult). The Orlando Sentinel traces the money trail back to a number of state legislators’ groups, including one led by GOP state Sen. Don Gaetz, the guy who… big surprise… is tasked with leading redistricting for the state Senate.

• NV-Sen: By far the most interesting news of what’s been a very slow news day is that John Ensign appears to be running again, at least according to one of his spokespersons. While he’s been acting like he’d run again (and he was probably encouraged by that recent PPP poll showing him leading Dean Heller in a GOP primary), it’s still a little surprising, given the disrepair his fundraising operation has fallen into, and the pile of ethics and potentially criminal investigations he’ll have to navigate next year. (H/t sebby123.)

• FL-Sen: Can’t a man publish an op-ed in a major in-state newspaper without people thinking he’s running for a higher office? Well, apparently not, based on reaction to a column written by Rep. Connie Mack IV in the Orlando Sentinel that took Bill Nelson to task over extension of Bush-era tax cuts. Beltway code-talkers are interpreting this as the first salvo of a likely Senate race.

• WV-Sen, WV-Gov, WV-02: GOP Rep. Shelly Moore Capito is sounding studiously noncommital about her plans for 2012. A challenge to newly-elected (in a special election) Sen. Joe Manchin? “I’m not ruling it out…” but also “I have given no thought to it…” (other than, by definition, the amount of thought needed in order to decide not to rule it out). She also didn’t rule out running for Governor in 2012, although she did pretty explicitly rule out running for Governor if the legislature decides they should have a fast odd-numbered-year special election to replace Manchin in 2011. A Manchin/Capito match would be between two super-popular politicians: a Blankenship (the pollster, not the coal company) survey just found Manchin with 80% approvals and Capito at 77%.

• AL-02: Bobby Bright popped up today to criticize the Dems’ decision to retain Nancy Pelosi as leader, but he also offered some vague “never say never” sentiments about a return engagement for his seat, saying he wouldn’t rule it out in 2012.

• IN-06: With Mike Pence looking likelier that he’s up and out of the House after this term — although whether he’s running for Governor or President is unclear — Roll Call names some potential replacements. One is a blast from the past: ex-Rep. David McIntosh, who represented an earlier iteration of this district (then IN-02) from 1994 to 2000, when he lost the Governor’s race. Other names include Wayne Co. Sheriff Matt Strittmatter, former state Rep. Luke Messer (whom you might remember from narrowly losing the IN-05 primary to Dan Burton this year), and rich guy Don Bates (who finished 4th in the IN-Sen primary this year, and has also been rumored for a Richard Lugar primary challenge).

• LA-SoS: Here’s an interesting career pivot: soon-to-be-ex. Rep. Joe Cao is considering a run for Louisiana Secretary of State. He’d face a primary against Tom Schedler, a Republican who will be acting SoS for the next year (current SoS Jay Dardenne is about to be sworn in as Lt. Governor) and will be running for a permanent slot next year. (H/t GOPVOTER.)

• AK-Sen: The big news out of Alaska is that Joe Miller is now suing to disenfranchise bad spellers. It’s probably his only path to victory, forcing the state to adhere to a strict absolutely-spelled-correctly standard for “Lisa Murkowski” instead of a looser standard of analyzing voter intent. Miller’s lawyer is asking a federal judge for a hearing this afternoon, seeing as how the state is planning to begin the process of checking and counting the 92,000 write-in ballots cast. Miller did get a leg up from the absentee count (of 27,000 additional ballots) issued yesterday, though. Murkowski went into yesterday leading by 13,439 votes (a 7% spread) and came out leading by 11,333 (a 5% spread). That’s not the end of the absentee and early-vote count, either; another 12,000 remain to be counted, on top of all the write-in analysis.

• MA-Sen: I wonder just what the heck Marty Meehan is planning to do with his millions of dollars ($4.5 mil — compare that with likely candidate Mike Capuano’s $91K CoH!) in cash on hand, currently getting moldy in some bank vault. The ex-Rep. and current university president deferred on yet another Senate run, saying he won’t challenge Scott Brown in 2012. At any rate, even with the most-loaded potential challenger out (short of Some Millionaire showing up and swamping the race with self-funding), the Beltway CW still is still treating Scott Brown as the most endangered GOPer for 2012, and that seems to have gotten amplified with the generally-strong top-to-bottom performance of Dems last week in the Bay State, suggesting that the Senate special election may have operated in its own little unusual vacuum.

• ME-Sen: Turnabout’s fair play, I guess. With the DC press trying to drum up some drama out of (possibly non-existent) GOP overtures to get Joe Manchin and Ben Nelson to switch parties, now there’s word from, uh, somebody about Dem outreach to Olympia Snowe to get her to switch (and avoid a likely teabagging in a 2012 GOP primary).

• MT-Sen: We mentioned businessman and losing 2008 Lt. Gov. candidate Steve Daines yesterday as a potential challenger to Jon Tester, and it looks like he’s already moving full speed ahead. He’ll be announcing his bid this Saturday.

• NE-Sen: Right on cue, here’s the first Republican-sponsored poll of the 2012 cycle showing Ben Nelson in deep shit. The poll, commissioned by the state Republican party from Voter/Consumer Research, finds Nelson trailing the one announced candidate, AG Jon Bruning, by a 50-35 margin. (He also trails Generic R 42-32, and Gov. Dave Heineman 59-31, although Heineman has already said he’s not running.) Interestingly, he’s still above water on his approvals, which are 50/41… but it’s a red enough state that that may not be enough to save him.

• NV-Sen: PPP is turning its attention to 2012 already, and its first poll is a juicy place to start: the GOP primary in Nevada. This is something of a surprise, at least upending the conventional wisdom: John Ensign has significant leads over both his highest-profile potential primary opponents. He beats Rep. Dean Heller 45-37, and Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki 55-27. Those leads may not hold up across a campaign, though, as Ensign has much higher name rec than either opponent. He’s at 64/23 (remember, this is only Republicans in the sample, who, if David Vitter is any indication, are firm believers in the principle of IOKIYAR), while Heller is at 56/8 and Krolicki is at 45/9.

• RI-Sen: The names are also floating up for potential Republican challengers to Sheldon Whitehouse, with so-so approvals but not considered terribly vulnerable in his blue-state perch. State GOP chair Giovanni Cicione is publicly weighing a bid (although he’s also saying that he’s pushing outgoing Gov. Don Carcieri to make a bid, though he doesn’t sound interested). Two other possibilities mentioned in the article include Warwick mayor Scott Avedisian and Cranston mayor Allen Fung.

• WV-Sen: This whole thing is getting a little too meta for me: with the perception out there of having gotten publicly burned on their attempts to get Joe Manchin to switch parties, now NRSC spokespersons are trying to say that the whole rumors of the outreach (which may or may not have actually happened) originated with the Manchin camp, so that he can bolster his bipartisan credentials. I can’t decide whether the two camps are truly playing 3-D chess with each other or it’s just devolved into high school mean-girls behavior at this point.

• CA-11, CA-20: Jerry McNerney keeps adding to his lead, making this one looking likely to get called soon. He’s now up by 2,269 votes after a batch came in from blue Alameda County. We don’t have any specific new numbers to report for you further south in the 20th, but the long-awaited dump of Fresno County ballots (where Jim Costa has led by a significant margin over Andy Vidak) is scheduled for later today, which is expected to push Costa into the lead (Vidak currently leads by only 145 right now, thanks to his home base of Kings County).

• FL-22: Allen West’s hiring of a controversial talk show host as his chief of staff (payback for her constant boosterism of his campaign) is not only great fodder for the sheer litany of terrible things she’s said (click the link for more), but it also may run into ethical and even FCC problems if she keeps her other job as radio host. The counsel for the House Committee on Standards of Ethical Conduct said the situation is “potentially problematic” because of conflicts of interest, and a different expert says it may also pave the way for demands for equal time on the air for whoever West’s 2012 opponent is.

• PA-11: You may remember Corey O’Brien, the Lackawanna County Commissioner who lost the Dem primary in the 11th to Paul Kanjorski back in May. With the elderly Kanjorski not likely to try for a rematch, O’Brien looks to be in the driver’s seat with regards to the Dem nomination for 2012 to go up against Lou Barletta in this D+4 district (though that’s subject to the redistricting pen, of course). The buzz is he’s a near-definite candidate, although he might face a primary bout with Scranton mayor (and, briefly, gubernatorial candidate) Chris Doherty.

• DCCC: In case you didn’t know, lawyers get really expensive really fast. One of Chris Van Hollen’s last acts as DCCC head is to send out a fundraising blast to donors, trying to round up $100K to cover potential recount activity in (according to him) nine different races.

• House: Nate Silver’s new piece matches what I’ve seen a lot of in the comments (and my own perceptions, as well): the idea that 2012 should be a year of happy hunting for Dems in the House (although, especially with redistricting giving a boost to the GOP, a heavy lift to get back into the majority). The balance of mismatched seats has switched dramatically: now there are 12 Dems in seats that Obama lost (down from 50), and 55 GOPers in seats that Obama won (up from 28). Even if that’s old news to you, the array of graphs is worth checking out.

• IA-St. Sen.: It looks like things have been finalized in Iowa, and the state Senate is at least one closely-decided legislative chamber that we pulled out of the fire. Democrat Tod Bowman’s 71-vote victory in SD-13 gives the Dems 26-24 control over the body. (One other outstanding race, where the GOPer is narrowly leading, could also break for the Dems.) That leaves the Oregon state Senate as the chamber that’s still probably the biggest question mark.

• Chicago mayor: We’ve been meaning for a while now to do a comprehensive who’s-in-who’s-out post about the mayoral race in Chicago, but here’s a potentially big name that deserves immediate mention… if only because he’s in the House, and if there’s one thing SSP is all about at this point in the cycle, it’s the Open Seat Watch. Rep. Danny Davis of IL-07 on Chicago’s West Side (who’d previously flirted with and decided against a bid for Cook Co. Executive) is now expressing interest in the race, saying he’s “ready to run.” In a boost to his prospects, a coalition of black religious and community leaders that had previously supported ex-Sen. Carol Mosely Braun for the job has reversed course, and is now backing Davis.

• FL-Sen: It seems like the “permanent campaign” is pretty much the new normal these days, as everybody’s already talking about who’s gonna run in 2012. In Florida, the list of potential GOP challengers to Bill Nelson is deep even if Jeb Bush doesn’t follow through on an unlikely bid. Appointed (and soon to be ex-)Sen. George LeMieux seems to be ramping up for a bid, although he might suffer for his Charlie Crist ties. Other GOPers mentioned include Rep. Connie Mack IV, state House majority leader Adam Hasner, state Senate president Mike Haridopolos, and newly-elected Rep. Daniel Webster.

• MA-Sen: As for the Dem field in Massachusetts, one prominent potential candidate is staying mum for now. Boston mayor Tom Menino welcomes the attention but is “focused on being mayor.”

• MT-Sen: And then there’s Montana, where freshman Jon Tester is probably one of the most vulnerable Senate Dems. At-large GOP Rep. Denny Rehberg is usually the first name you hear mentioned in that context, but he seems to be in no hurry to decide. Two other GOPers are making moves, though: businessman and losing 2008 Lt. Gov. nominee Steve Daines, and Neil Livingstone, CEO of a “crisis management firm” and frequent anti-terrorism talking head, are both actively looking at the race.

• WV-Sen, NE-Sen: It looks like Joe Manchin’s spokesperson’s denial yesterday of any interest in switching parties wasn’t vehement enough, because Manchin had to reiterate that, no, he isn’t considering it; in addition, Senate GOP spokespersons said those conversations alleged by Fox News apparently never even took place. The same situation applies in Nebraska, where Ben Nelson says that not only is he not interested in switching but that no one has reached out to him to do so. Encouragingly, at least from a rhetorical standpoint, Nelson also says “the party hasn’t left me.”

• MS-Gov: With two well-liked former Reps. idling around wondering what to do next year (Gene Taylor and Travis Childers), you’d think the Dems might actually be able to field a competitive candidate for Mississippi next year. According to at least one local pundit, a Childers comeback doesn’t seem likely (more interested in state party chair), while Taylor seems to have running for something in mind but potentially just his old seat again in ’12.

• OH-Gov: Here’s a good post-mortem on Ted Strickland from Jonathan Chait, which suggests that Strickland managed to keep things close (despite the rest of the wipeout in Ohio) because a solid campaign that focused on just the right amount of populism. He ran well ahead of national Dems on average among groups like seniors and persons with high school educations.

• FL-22: Is Allen West the Bizarro World version of Alan Grayson? He’s an ideological mismatch with his Florida district that leans the wrong way away from his party let alone his own amped-up version of its message, he has no built-in self-censor like most politicians, and he was elected more so by nationwide online supporters than the locals. And now he’s hiring from his own echo chamber, turning for his Chief of Staff not a Capitol Hill pro but the conservative talk show host who helped bolster his campaign. Joyce Kaufman is the one who said on her show this summer that “if ballots don’t work, bullets will.”

• NY-23: Doug Hoffman is truly the gift that keeps on giving. The election’s over, and he’s still giving. He now says he didn’t mean to send out a statement that he put out last week post-election, calling local Republican bosses the real “spoilers in this race.” (Hoffman, of course, pulled in 6% of the vote last week, saving Bill Owens yet again.)

• NY-25: Trailing slightly with the absentee-counting process looming, Dan Maffei (like Tim Bishop in NY-01) is requesting a hand count of ballots (the electronic voting machines generate a paper trail). A judge also ruled that both camps may inspect the list of 11,000 absentee ballot requests, a prelim to each camp developing the list of which ballots they want to challenge.

• DCCC: It’s sounding more and more like Rep. Steve Israel will be on tap to head the DCCC for the 2012 cycle. He was one of the three key deputies at the DCCC last year (along with Joe Crowley, who seems to be edging away from the job, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who seems interested too but not in as strong a position with the Pelosi-led core of leadership).

• House: Here’s an interesting piece of trivia: only eight (8) House Dems did better, percentage-wise in 2010 than they did in 2008. Most are from safe urban districts (most notably Nancy Pelosi herself, despite the seven figures the right-roots raised for her opponent), although Jim Himes and Chellie Pingree were in competitive races and managed to gain ground.

• Polltopia: PPP puts together a helpful table of approval ratings on the various Senators up for re-election in 2012. It corresponds pretty closely with the general conventional wisdom about who’s vulnerable: Joe Lieberman is in worst shape at 33/54, followed by Claire McCaskill and Debbie Stabenow (who actually are in slightly worse condition than John Ensign, though his problems go well beyond his approvals). Interestingly, the best-liked Senator statewide (Olympia Snowe at 56/34) may also be one of the most vulnerable, not in a general but to a teabagging in the GOP primary.

• AK-Sen: Joe Miller finally fessed up to what we told you about last week (concerning farmland he owned in Alaska): he’s a hypocrite on the farm subsidy issue, having gladly accepted them while railing against them. This time, it’s about a different parcel of farmland in Kansas that he owned before moving to Alaska, receiving $7K in GOVERNMENT HANDOUTS FOR LAZY UNPRODUCTIVE PEOPLE WHO’VE MADE BAD LIFESTYLE CHOICES!!!1! between the years 1990 and 1997. And check out the excuse he offers: “This was back in the ’90s, the situation the country was in was far different than now.” (Uh huh… when some guy named Bill Clinton was running a surplus.)

• DE-Sen: Whoops. Prior to getting their establishment asses handed them to them on the end of a mob-wielded pitchfork, the Delaware state GOP filed a FEC complaint against Christine O’Donnell for illegal campaign coordination with and excessive contributions from the Tea Party Express. Now that they’re saddled with her as the nominee, the FEC is telling them no-backsies, and that they can’t withdraw the complaint… the complaint against their own nominee.

• NC-Sen: And now it’s Richard Burr’s turn in the hypocrisy dunk tank. An announcement of 240 new jobs and a $130 million expansion at Cree Inc. in Durham is drawing four major Democrats and Richard Burr to celebrate. Burr, unlike the Democrats, though, did not support the stimulus package that, y’know, was behind that expansion.

• NV-Sen: John Ensign may not even survive till the general election in 2012, if Jon Ralston’s tweet is to be believed. John Chachas, the little-known self-funder who barely made a ripple in the overcrowded 2010 GOP Senate field but who seems likely to do better in a one-on-one, is saying he may run against Ensign in two years.

• GA-Gov, GA-Sen: Mason-Dixon for Georgia Newspaper Partnership:

Roy Barnes (D): 41

Nathan Deal (R): 45

Michael Thurmond (D): 33

Johnny Isakson (R-inc): 52

(MoE: ±4%)

While this isn’t as nice as the InsiderAdvantage poll showing the race tied in the wake of disclosures about Nathan Deal’s financial disarray, Mason-Dixon does show a close race. This appears to be their first poll of the Barnes/Deal matchup, so there’s no sense of whether things have tightened.

• RI-Gov: Faced with the choice between a labor-friendly indie candidate and a Democrat whom they endorsed for state Treasurer four years ago, the AFL-CIO finally decided to punt, and endorse neither Lincoln Chafee nor Frank Caprio, remaining neutral. Recall that Chafee got SEIU and nurses’ union backing yesterday.

• AZ-05: There’s a new internal out in the rematch in Arizona’s 5th that founds its way across someone’s desk at the Hill. It’s from Democratic pollster Harstad Strategic Research and is apparently on behalf of the Harry Mitchell campaign, giving Mitchell a narrow lead over David Schweikert, 45-44 with 6 to the Libertarian candidate. That’s kind of pushing the limits on when it’s a good idea to release an internal, but with Schweikert having claimed an 8-point lead in his own internal and the DCCC’s ambiguous pull-out announcement about this district triggering some alarms, Mitchell seemed to need to show he’s still right in the thick of things.

UPDATE: The Mitchell campaign writes in to clarify that this isn’t their internal poll (which the Hill had originally reported, then apparently deleted), but rather is on behalf of Project New West. Mitchell’s up 51-29 among independents, which helps him prevail even in a sample that’s slightly GOP-skewed (46% GOP, 30% Dem) You can see the polling memo here.

• LA-02: Anzalone-Liszt for Cedric Richmond (9/12-15, likely voters, no trendlines):

Cedric Richmond (D): 45

Joe Cao (R): 35

(MoE: ±4.4%)

Here’s the antidote to that bizarre Joe Cao internal from a few months back, that gave him a 25-point lead over Cedric Richmond. Even this Richmond internal, which has him up by 10, indicates that this isn’t going to be a total cakewalk for the Dems, though; with only 35%, Cao is still way overperforming the GOP baseline in this district that went for Barack Obama with 75% of the vote in 2008.  

• MN-01: Tim Walz picked up an endorsement from an unexpected corner yesterday. He got the backing of former Republican Senator David Durenberger, who support Walz’s stance on “uniting people” but also his support for health care reform. (Durenberger is also supporting IP candidate Tom Horner in the governor’s race.)

• PA-15: Muhlenberg College for the Allentown Morning Call (9-11/16, likely voters, 4/19-27 in parentheses):

John Callahan (D): 38 (33)

Charlie Dent (R-inc): 49 (45)

Jake Towne (I): 3 (?)

Undecided: 10 (22)

(MoE: ±5%)

John Callahan’s one of the best Dem challengers to a GOP incumbent this cycle, but he’s got a lot of work ahead of him to make up that last 12 points against Charlie Dent.

• NRSC: Here’s an interesting Roll Call dispatch from the front lines in the war between the NRSC and the Army of One known as Jim DeMint. DeMint is apparently dissatisfied with current NRSC allocations, and is moving money from his own personal stash to bolster Sharron Angle in Nevada ($156K) and Ken Buck in Colorado ($250K). The NRSC has reserved $3.2 million for Buck in TV time, more than any other candidate, so his concerns about Colorado may be misplaced.

• SSP TV:

• IL-Sen: The DSCC hits Mark Kirk for voting against unemployment extensions and minimum wage raises

• MO-Sen: Roy Blunt disappears down the meta rabbithole, with an attack ad about Robin Carnahan’s attack ads

• NV-Sen: Can we just have Harry Reid handle the advertising for all our candidates? He turns up the heat even higher on Sharron Angle, saying she wants to privatize the VA and “end our promise to our veterans”

• IA-Gov: Two separate ads for Chet Culver, one featuring endorsements from his immediate family members, the other making the case that “hey, Iowa’s not that bad off compared to all those other states”

• NM-Gov: Susana Martinez’s ad is a positive bio spot recounting her early prosecuting days

• SC-Gov: Vince Sheheen’s TV ad features a litany of reasons to be suspicious of Nikki Haley, recited by various average folks

• OH-16: The DCCC’s newest spot is a tax-time two-fer, hitting Jim Renacci on supporting the 23% “fair tax” and on his own pile of back taxes owed

• OR-05: Kurt Schrader’s newest is a testimonial from a thankful veteran

• TN-08: Roy Herron’s newest ad hits Stephen Fincher mostly on his various campaign finance discrepancies of misfilings and mysterious loans

• WI-07: Julie Lassa’s newest ad features criticism from a Sean Duffy underling from the DA’s office in Ashland County, focusing on his neglect of that stepping-stone job

• Rasmussen:

• AK-Sen: Scott McAdams (D) 25%, Joe Miller (R) 42%, Lisa Murkowski (W-I-inc) 27%

• CA-Sen: Barbara Boxer (D-inc) 47%, Carly Fiorina (R) 43%

• NY-Sen-B: Kirsten Gillibrand (D-inc) 49%, Joe DioGuardi (R) 39%

• RI-Gov: Frank Caprio (D) 30%, John Robitaille (R) 23%, Lincoln Chafee (I) 33%

• Rasmussen (appearing as Fox/Pulse):

• CA-Gov: Jerry Brown (D) 45%, Meg Whitman (R) 45%

• CA-Sen: Barbara Boxer (D-inc) 47%, Carly Fiorina (R) 46%

• DE-Sen: Chris Coons (D) 54%, Christine O’Donnell (R) 39%

• NV-Sen: Harry Reid (D-inc) 45%, Sharron Angle (R) 46%

• OH-Gov: Ted Strickland (D-inc) 41%, John Kasich (R) 47%

• OH-Sen: Lee Fisher (D) 36%, Rob Portman (R) 49%

• PA-Gov: Dan Onorato (D) 39%, Tom Corbett (R) 49%

• PA-Sen: Joe Sestak (D) 40%, Pat Toomey (R) 48%

• CO-Sen: So since the last time we checked in, Ken Buck royally stepped in it not just once, but twice. First, he made the argument that voters should opt for him and not Jane Norton because “he doesn’t wear high heels.” (It was by way of arguing that, instead, he wears cowboy boots with actual bullshit on them, but the gender card was pretty clear. And Norton’s response was easy to write, and was on the air almost instantaneously. It probably played at least something of a role in today’s decision by Arizona governor Jan Brewer, amassing her own clutch of Mama Rattlesnakes, to extend an endorsement to Norton.) Then second, it came out over the weekend that on June 11, Buck was overheard referring to Tea Partiers (or at least the birthers among them) as “dumbasses.” (Compounding the unforced nature of the error was that he was joking around with his Democratic tracker while saying it!) Buck was out with the inevitable apology to the teabaggers within the day. (Y’know, for a bunch of self-styled tough guys, they sure do get their feelings hurt easily.)

• CT-Sen: Despite his blowing through a large chunk of his remaining cash on hand in a baffling ad urging people to vote in the Republican primary (although not specifically for him), Rob Simmons is still maintaining that he’s not currently a candidate for the Senate. He considers his $350K ad buy as something like “public service announcements.”

• FL-Sen: Must be nice to have Jeff Greene’s money! Concerned observers are a bit troubled by the close correlation between his hiring of DNC member Jon Ausman as a consultant, and his next-day endorsement of Greene’s campaign. Greene has spent $6 million of his own money on the race so far, which apparently is a drop in the bucket for him, as he’s been content to ignore a $1.87 million fine from the government of Belize that’s outstanding against him, after he crashed his 145-foot yacht into a sensitive coral reef there.

• IL-Sen: Continuing the boat-crashing theme, in case you’ve been living under a rock all weekend, the big news in Illinois is that Mark Kirk has gotten caught in yet another series of misrememberments, this time about his sailboat accident and subsequent Coast Guard rescue that supposedly got him devoted to public service. Turns out he at least got the being in a sailboat accident part right, but, unlike his own description of the events, he was rescued long before nightfall, he probably didn’t swim for a mile because he was within half a mile of shore, and his core temperature certainly wasn’t 82 because he would have lost consciousness long before getting to that point. Sensing a pattern here?

• KY-Sen: Rand Paul is re-affirming that he supports Mitch McConnell. Well, sort of. During his Fancy Farm appearance this weekend, he said he’s going to vote for McConnell for leader, but almost immediately afterwards, reduced that to not seeing a reason why he wouldn’t vote for him. Observers also noted that, in his earlier sorta-support for McConnell, he was implicitly dissing Sharron Angle as unlikely to win, by way of saying that Jack Conway’s first action would be to vote for Harry Reid for majority leader (something that, of course, wouldn’t happen if Reid weren’t to get re-elected).

• NV-Sen: Sharron Angle’s media policy can be summed up in one word: RUN! That’s what she did when faced with questions from a six-months-pregnant reporter last week, who, in typical lamestream media fashion, insisted on asking some further questions after a three-minute speech of boilerplate on the estate tax. How presumptuous! Harry Reid got further good news, too, with the endorsement of Las Vegas mayor and relentless self-promoter Oscar Goodman, who called Reid “the man we go to get things done in the city.” If there’s one Nevadan having an even worse time than Angle, though, it’s John Ensign; his one-time crony Tom Coburn just hung him out to dry, handing over e-mails from Ensign in the ongoing criminal investigation by the DOJ into l’affaire Hampton.

• WV-Sen: With filing closed in West Virginia, there are eleven GOPers fighting in the primary for the right to oppose Joe Manchin in the Senate special election. Most prominent, of course, is businessman John Raese, who lost the 2006 Senate race to Robert Byrd and is also something of an archenemy to the Moore/Capito family. The only other noteworthy GOPer is Mac Warner, who already lost the WV-01 primary this year (and whose brother, Monty Warner, was the 2004 GOP gubernatorial nominee, losing badly to Manchin). Raese punctuated his entry with some ill-advised and outdated ethnic humor, comparing the Italian-American Manchin to Tony Soprano. The NRSC, probably not liking any of its options here (and having gotten burned by some of its earlier interventions), says it isn’t getting involved in the primary.

• CO-Gov: The rumor du jour last week was that the RGA was prepared to pull out of Colorado entirely — and that was before this morning’s confirmation that Tom Tancredo was going to jump into the race as an indie candidate in order to either leverage the GOP nomination or crash-land the whole operation. The RGA denied the rumors when they first came out, but the local GOPers working on the race are suddenly leaking e-mails that they’re broke. And with Tancredo‘s bid today, suddenly his allies and core backers among the Tea Partiers are suddenly denouncing him, accusing him of being a likely spoiler, whether intentional or not. Bafflingly, Tancredo pushed back in the way most likely to rub them the wrong way, calling the teabaggers new members of the “establishment.” Tancredo’s getting some pushback from state party chair Dick Wadhams, too; TPM has audio of the literal screaming match between the two of them.

• FL-Gov: You may remember state Sen. Paula Dockery, who was running a futile campaign against Bill McCollum in the GOP gubernatorial primary until dropping out after getting totally eclipsed by Rick Scott. Well, now she’s teaming up with Scott; she’s stopping somewhere short of endorsing him, but is joining him on his bus tour, saying she share similar stances on the issues. (She can’t be angling for a Lt. Gov. slot, as Florida elects its LG separately, so what her angle is, I don’t know. UPDATE: Actually, commenters have corrected me on Florida’s LG procedure, wherein the nominees pick running mates, so, yes, it does sound like she’s angling for LG.) Also, while it isn’t exactly about the horse race, here’s a fascinating (at least to me) piece of backstory about Democratic candidate Alex Sink. Her slightly Asian appearance is because she’s 1/8th Thai, and her great-grandfather was a well-known celebrity in the early 1800s: circus performer Chang Bunker, one-half of the original so-called “Siamese Twins.”

• GA-Gov: Dueling (banjo) endorsements in the Georgia GOP gubernatorial runoff, and they seem to fit the overall media narratives about the two candidates. The suburbanized Karen Handel got Mitt Romney’s endorsement, while the more hickory-smoked Nathan Deal got the backing of the NRA.

• OK-Gov (pdf): There’s one more poll of the primaries in Oklahoma (to be decided tomorrow night), from the Republican firm of Cole Hargrave Snodgrass & Associates, apparently on their own and not on anyone else’s behalf. The results are pretty similar to this weekend’s Sooner Poll: they see AG Drew Edmondson beating Lt. Gov. Jari Askins 38-27 on the Dem side, and Rep. Mary Fallin well ahead of state Sen. Randy Brogdon 50-22 on the GOP side. Askins did get one late-breaking endorsement, though, that’s good as gold in this football-mad state: she got the backing of former OU and Dallas Cowboys head coach Barry Switzer. Switzer’s backing is credited with helping Brad Henry win a come-from-behind victory in the 2002 Dem gubernatorial primary.

• OH-St. House: Here’s something you don’t see every day: a local article about a competitive state legislative chamber where you don’t get just platitudes about the closeness, but actual detail about the most competitive races. Democrats currently control the state House 53-46 after picking it up in 2008, and it could revert back to the GOP this year. The Democratic seats on defense that they list are scattered among Columbus, Cincinnati, and Cleveland suburbs, and Appalachian-flavored rural areas like Portsmouth and Zanesville.

• OR-Init: Oregon stands out as the only west coast state that doesn’t have an independent redistricting commission for state legislative seats. It looks like that’s going to continue: a proposed initiative to create an independent commission of retired judges for redistricting didn’t qualify for the ballot, after too many signatures turned out to be invalid. 2002 GOP governor candidate and bringer-of-the-crazy Kevin Mannix was the leader of the move, although he actually had some big money interests behind him this time (like Nike’s Phil Knight).

• Rasmussen:

• AZ-Sen (R): John McCain (R-inc) 54%, J.D. Hayworth (R) 34%

• ND-Sen: Tracy Potter (D) 22%, John Hoeven (R) 69%

• 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.

(Note: The content of this post was written entirely by DavidNYC.)

FL-Sen: If there’s one small upside to the terrible tragedy unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, it’s that the drill, baby, drill brigade is being made to squirm painfully. Larry Kudlow, of all people, beat it out of Marco Rubio that he “opposes a moratorium on offshore drilling, opposes forcing BP to stop paying dividends to shareholders, and supports continued drilling off Florida’s coasts in the long run.” I like it when clear lines are drawn.

KY-Sen: This reminds me of C3PO’s advice to R2D2 after the latter beat Chewbacca in chess: “I suggest a new strategy – let the Wookie win.” Rand Paul’s new defeatist strategy is to only take questions from reporters in writing. I just hope libertarian whackjobs don’t pull people’s arms out of their sockets when they lose.

NV-Sen: Like Hyman Roth introducing Michael Corleone to his network of gangsters, John Ensign is putting his arm around Sharron Angle’s shoulder and shepherding her to a lunch today with Republican senators. (Actually, if anything, Ensign reminds me of Senator Geary, also of Nevada.) Meanwhile, Harry Reid’s streak of good fortune continues: Mitch McConnell announced that he won’t campaign against the Majority Leader. Does anyone really believe that McConnell is doing this to restore the supposed “comity” that Bill Frist allegedly shredded when he campaigned against Tom Daschle in 2004? If it would even give the GOP the slightest edge, I’m sure Mitch would be in Vegas tomorrow. Nah, I think even McConnell must sense the tide turning in this race.

AL-Gov: The recount to see who gets to make the GOP runoff is set to get underway. Tim James trails Robert Bentley for second place by 167 votes (almost half a million total were cast in the primary). James has had to mail checks to every one of Alabama’s 67 counties to pay for the recount, totally some $200,000. Officials expect results either Thursday or Friday.

SC-Gov: It looks like Henry McMaster has a little more sense than Andre Bauer: the state AG is going to endorse front-runner Nikki Haley today in the runoff, while the Lt. Gov. previously endorsed Gresham Barrett, widely seen as a no-hoper at this point.

FL-08: At the link is what will supposedly be Alan Grayson’s first TV ad of the cycle. It’s not up yet – he’s busy flogging it to push people to donate so that he can air it, since he only has $1.5 million in the bank. Pretty weird, disjointed ad if you ask me, with a garbled message.

GA-04: Shirley Franklin, who was mayor of Atlanta until this year, endorsed Dem Rep. Hank Johnson in his bid for re-election. Johnson faces a primary challenge from DeKalb County Commissioner Connie Stokes, and former DeKalb CEO Vernon Jones.

NM-03: Sharron Angle, Rand Paul, and Dale Peterson – step aside. Tom Mullins has officially come up with the most insane Republican idea of the cycle: he thinks we could put land mines (!!!!!) along the US-Mexico border to deter illegal immigration. I love it when Republicans get all eliminationist with their rhetoric.

MS-01: The Tarrance Group (R) for Alan Nunnelee (6/8-9, likely voters, March in parens):

Travis Childers (D-inc): 42 (51)

Alan Nunnelee (R): 50 (42)

(MoE: ±5.6%)

Nunnelee favorables: 44/8. Childers favorables: 49/30. Obama approval: 36%.

SC-04: Bob Inglis has a week left in his runoff against Trey Gowdy, but it sounds like he’s already playing his swan song. Inglis has dropped all negative attacks on his opponent and instead is launching a final ad which takes swipes at Washington, DC – a tough move for an incumbent to pull off, to say the least. Politico speculates that perhaps Inglis is trying to win over supporters of the also-rans, but that seems like a fridge too far at this late date. P’co also notes that Inglis isn’t revealing the size of the ad buy. Also curious to me is the fact that the NRCC doesn’t seem to have done anything to help one of their own here.

Polltopia: It’s that time again: Head over to Public Policy Polling’s website to vote on your favorite place to poll.

• AR-Sen: Here’s a non-surprise. Americans for Job Security, who poured $1.8 million into anti-Bill Halter ads during the primary, say they probably aren’t going to be doing any further work on behalf of Blanche Lincoln. The anti-labor group already got what it wants (two anti-labor candidates), so its work is done. Also worth noting, Nate Silver points out what a tough lift a Bill Halter victory would have been, revealing something called the ‘blogginess’ index (a factor of being white, liberal, and college-educated), on which Arkansas scores very low and Pennsylvania scores pretty high (by way of explaining how Pennsylvania was more responsive to a labor/netroots primary challenge — although I’d point out that actual labor and netroots support wasn’t the main factor in pushing Joe Sestak past Arlen Specter, whereas it was the driving force in Halter’s bid). I’m not sure if he noticed or not, but the rank ordering of the states on that index is quite similar to the graph of most liberal-to-conservative Democratic electorates that Andrew Gelman introduced last week.

• CO-Sen: Jane Norton is making a rhetorical rush to the right, if her new advertising is any indication: it’s all about stopping “Obamacare” and “yanking it out by the roots,” and it’s playing mostly in the dark-red Colorado Springs market. Wondering why? She’s probably seeing the same thing in her polling as what Republican pollster Magellan (who are getting quite active in offering public polls of Republican primaries where they don’t have a horse in the race) is seeing. They have a poll out today showing Weld County DA Ken Buck leading Norton, 42-32.

• IL-Sen: Worse to worst for Mark Kirk? It looks like frustration with his constant politicizing of his military service was present even within the Department of Defense, as a DoD memo has surfaced that expressed “concerns arising from his partisan political activities during his last two tours of active duty.” Kirk was required to get a waiver before deploying to Afghanistan in 2008, which required him to write out “an acknowledgment of limitations required for all candidates on active duty.”

• NC-Sen: This is kind of an out-of-the-blue endorsement, but it may help Elaine Marshall gain a little traction with the national netroots. Ohio SoS Jennifer Brunner is apparently OK with endorsing outside her own state’s boundaries, as she offered her support to Marshall.

• NV-Sen: Echoes of Rand Paul’s still-in-progress post-primary makeover? Jon Ralston notices that Sharron Angle’s wacky website just got scrubbed, with no discussion of her positions at this point (no mention of Social Security elimination, for instance). Meanwhile, the GOP signals that they’re going to actively get involved in breaking out the message massage oil and work on rehabbing Angle: RNC head Michael Steele has pledged his support. RNC funds will go to the Nevada GOP rather than directly to Angle, whose campaign actually was in the red ($139K CoH, $179K debt) on May 19. (Compare that to Harry Reid’s $9.1 million.) And Angle’s reaching out to the GOP establishment, too, to the extent that she says she’s willing to accept campaign help from John Ensign, a flip-flop from her pre-primary position. Fitting, though, since she’s been a big proponent of embracing radioactive waste in Nevada. (And while I don’t ordinarily like to honk my own horn, after looking back through the SSP attic, I have to remind everybody that I forecasted an Angle primary victory back in October.)

• SC-Sen: There’s a growing sense that something’s amiss with Alvin Greene’s entry to the race, to the extent that Jim Clyburn explicitly called him a “plant” today and asked for a probe. The real puzzle is the timeline on Greene’s obscenity arrest, obtaining a public defender because of his indigence, and then his filing for the race:

The South Carolina Commission on Indigent Defense, which operates the state’s public defender program, makes clear that courts take into account “the number of people in your household, whether you own any real estate, or have money in the bank” when deciding whether to assign a public defender to a defendant.

Greene has claimed that he paid the $10,400 filing fee out of his savings from his military pay. But he was discharged from the Army in August 2009 and says he hasn’t held a job since then.

So, in economic terms, the timeline goes like this: Greene’s military paychecks stopped in August. Three months later, he filed an affidavit with a South Carolina court claiming to be indigent. And four months after that he walked into the South Carolina Democratic Party headquarters with a personal check for $10,400.

Losing gubernatorial candidate Robert Ford (who’s African-American) also sheds some light on how Greene might have won despite his complete unknownness: apparently, in South Carolina, “Greene” (as opposed to “Green”) is understood to be an African-American last name. With South Carolina’s Democratic electorate with a black majority, voters with no other information about the two choices might vote based purely on that.

• UT-Sen: After previously having had some nice things to say about him, 4th place finisher Cherilyn Eagar went the whole way and endorsed Tim Bridgewater for the GOP Senate primary against Mike Lee.

• WI-Sen: Republican businessman Ron Johnson, who has some personal wealth to draw on in his bid against Russ Feingold, is launching his first television ads. A source tells SSP that this is a one-week statewide ad buy for about $350K.

• AL-Gov: Second-place finisher Robert Bentley is out with an internal poll (by Dresner Wicker) giving him a big lead in the runoff against Bradley Byrne, 45-29. That’s somewhat plausible, since Bentley seems likelier to consolidate the votes for the most conservative options, Roy Moore and Tim James, than is “moderate” Byrne. (Of course, since James is paying for a recount, it’s not a done deal that Bentley’s in the runoff.)

• CO-Gov: Scott McInnis, facing a primary from teabagger Dan Maes (who pulled even with him at the state convention), now says he “doesn’t remember” serving on the board of pro-choice group Republicans for Choice. However, paperwork filed with the FEC lists him on the group’s letterhead as a board member from 1996 to 2005… that’s ten years.

• SC-Gov: Nikki Haley is out with an internal poll giving her a big lead heading into the runoff against Gresham Barrett, 62-28 (suggesting she’s gotten the majority of the gains from the primary, where she led 49-22). Barrett‘s staying in (despite a sandbagging by the RGA), and he’s already out with a TV ad, where he appears with a drill sergeant who calls him “a Christian family man who won’t embarrass us.” I’m not sure if that cringeworthy line is supposed to be an anti-Mark Sanford dogwhistle or an anti-Haley dogwhistle; maybe it’s intended to do double-duty.

• GA-09: Despite losing the runoff in the special election in the 9th, Lee Hawkins is continuing to fight on; he’ll also challenge Rep.-elect Tom Graves in the regularly scheduled July primary. Hawkins didn’t fare as poorly as expected, staying within 56-44, and may be counting on the late-breaking news about Graves’s attempts to dodge a lawsuit over an unpaid business loan continuing to be a story in coming months.

• ID-01: Greg Smith & Associates released a poll (apparently not on any candidate’s behalf), showing Raul Labrador leading Democratic freshman Walt Minnick, 36-24. Recall, though, that this is the same pollster that found Minnick leading “the Republican” candidate 50-20 before the primary (and the link also helpfully provides a list of other times Smith has been way off the mark).

• VA-05: This should put to rest any notions that ex-Rep. Virgil Goode was considering a third-party independent teabagger-powered run in the 5th, or that he might throw his backing to one of the minor-league third-partiers running. Goode endorsed establishment Republican Rob Hurt to go against Rep. Tom Perriello.

• CO-Sen: That whole not-participating-in-the-GOP-convention-because-she-would-have-been-humiliatingly-defeated thing doesn’t seem to have been much of an impediment for Jane Norton. She just turned in 35,000 signatures to qualify for the ballot by petition; she only needs 1,500 from each of the state’s seven CDs.

• NV-Sen: Sue Lowden is learning from Rand Paul’s mistakes (or is she?). During a televised Q&A with Jon Ralston, Lowden refused to respond to questions about whether she thought the Civil Rights Act should apply to private businesses. Eventually her handlers sent in a memo saying that she supports all aspects of the law. Meanwhile, Sharron “I am the Tea Party” Angle continues to press her advantages amidst Lowden’s slow-mo implosion, and that may be paying off in early voting, where there’s a surge of Republican early votes in the Reno area where Angle is from. But Angle just looks weirder and weirder as the media pay more attention to her (as seen in NRO’s Jim Geraghty’s piece on the bundle of contradictions from her legislative career, entitled “The Anti-Beer Libertarian“). Finally, it’s not too early to start thinking about 2012, and John Ensign, despite all the damage he’s sustained, is still acting like he plans to run again.

• SC-Sen (pdf): PPP is out with the Senate part of its South Carolina poll, and they find Jim DeMint with fairly tepid support but still looking pretty safe for re-election. DeMint leads Democratic rival Vic Rawl 49-30, although 82% have no opinion of Rawl so his numbers may go up. DeMint has only 43/36 approval numbers, and 39% think he spends too little time advocating for South Carolina (instead of his national-level hobby horses) while 38% think his balance is right.

• WA-Sen: State Sen. Don Benton may not be much longer for the GOP primary in the Senate race, with Dino Rossi’s official entry: he referred to Rossi as a “colleague” rather than a rival, and offered some equivocal-sounding statements that while he was committed to the race today, he didn’t rule out dropping out if it would improve GOP chances.

• WI-Sen: Rumors about this were swirling yesterday and now it’s official: real estate investor Terrence Wall, who had seemed like the frontrunner for the GOP nod until recently (unless one considered Tommy Thompson the frontrunner, during his boomlet), is dropping out of the Senate race. Free-spending businessman Ron Johnson, who won the GOP convention, will still face opposition from Dave Westlake.

• GA-Gov: InsiderAdvantage released a poll of the Democratic gubernatorial primary, where ex-Gov. Roy Barnes has been dominant so far and looks like he’s in position to avoid a runoff. Barnes is polling at 64, with Dubose Porter at 8, Thurbert Baker at 6, Carl Camon at 5, and David Poythress at 1.

• AR-01: Former Marion Berry CoS Chad Causey seems to be consolidating the backing of his ex-rivals in his Democratic runoff against ex-state Sen. Tim Wooldridge. With state Rep. David Cook already having endorsed, now state Sen. Steve Bryles did today too.

• GA-12: House whip Jim Clyburn is making an appearance at an Augusta historically-black college to talk up the benefits of the health care reform bill. There’s one wrinkle: that’s in GA-12, where Rep. John Barrow voted against HCR and faces a primary challenge from the left from African-American ex-state Sen. Regina Thomas. Clyburn says he’s already endorsed Barrow and doesn’t see the big deal, but Barrow has been trying to ward off Clyburn from appearing.

• MS-01: CQ has an interesting look at the fast-approaching GOP primary in this race, and while they don’t have polling data, they feel that a runoff is likely. The expected 2nd place finisher to state Sen. Alan Nunnelee may surprise you: not Fox News talker Angela McGlowan, whose campaign fell on its face out of the gate, but small-town mayor Henry Ross, who seems to have rallied the local teabaggers against “career politician” Nunnelee.

• VA-02: While frontrunner/establishment fave Scott Rigell should be vulnerable in the GOP primary in the 2nd, fractured opposition will probably let him waltz through. The local Tea Partiers seem to be realizing this problem and coalescing (probably too late, though) behind businessman Ben Loyola; the Hampton Roads Tea Party and the Virginia Beach Taxpayers Alliance both endorsed him. (Remember that Virginia has no runoff, so even if Loyola finished a distant second he couldn’t consolidate the supporters of the other teabaggers for another try.)

• WV-01: After using some anti-Nancy Pelosi rhetoric in the Democratic primary, the Mike Oliverio camp is dialing that down (seeing as how he might actually have to work with her). His manager says he’ll support “whomever Democrats support for Speaker.”

• House: Right-wing Vets for Freedom has a list of 10 House candidates they’re supporting this year, all of whom are veterans themselves, including some controversial lightning rods like Allen West and Ilario Pantano as well as blander figures like Joe Heck and Steve Stivers.

• NY-AG: This seems very unusual: the New York Democratic party backed five different candidates for AG at the convention, moving them all through to the primary ballot. Nassau Co. DA Kathleen Rice is probably the biggest name, along with Eric Schneiderman, Richard Brodsky, Eric Dinallo, and Sean Coffey. Liz Holtzman had previously released a poll showing her leading the primary field, but doesn’t seem to be following through on that.

• ID-St. Sen.: One place where the local teabaggers did seem to make a difference: four different incumbent Republican state senators lost their primaries, usually ones who’d been insufficiently hard-edged on taxes or even the decidedly parochial issue of fighting wolves. With a Senate with only 35 members, that’s pretty big turnover, although with conservative Republicans already dominant it doesn’t seem likely to change its outlook too much.

• Polltopia: Nate Silver has another interesting hit on Rasmussen today, comparing its polling on the question of Elana Kagan vs. CBS. Rasmussen finds many, many more people offering an opinion on her than other pollsters do, providing more evidence for the idea that its tight likely voter screen (and lack of callbacks) serves to make it mostly a poll of political junkies, i.e. the most motivated voters.

• Twitter: We’re just three followers away from a nice even 2,000! Who wants to be the one who puts us over the top?