Tag: Connecticut

2006 Senate candidate Ned Lamont announced today that he’s filing papers this afternoon for a possible run for governor in 2010.  

Excerpt from his e-mail blast and website announcement:

Since the 2006 campaign for Senate, I have continued to meet with citizens across our state – as co-chairman of the Obama campaign in Connecticut, founder of a state policy institute at Central Connecticut State University, and as an oustpoken advocate for health care reform. I have been constantly reminded during these conversations that Connecticut is not living up to its potential and that too many of our families are still being left behind.

Whether it has been health care and the economy, losing jobs, young people leaving the state, or the never-ending budget crisis, we have all seen our state head in the wrong direction.

Simply put, Connecticut’s current Chief Executive is not getting the job done.

Governor Jodi Rell’s approval rating has come down quite a bit this year, but she’s still at 57 percent approve/38 percent disapprove in the Pollster.com average. Then again, Lamont didn’t shy away from a longshot campaign in 2006, so he may be ready for another challenge.

I’d like to hear from SSP readers who are familiar with Connecticut politics. Could Lamont make a race of this? Would he be the strongest potential challenger against Rell? How would having him in the governor’s race affect Senator Chris Dodd’s re-election campaign?

We all know that Connecticut has become an unexpected early battleground in the 2010 cycle, and Republicans are touting Simmons as a strong challenger to the vulnerable Chris Dodd.  

The longtime Senator has had a lot of problems over the past few months, from his seat on Banking to the mortgage controversy. But it now looks like he is at risk of being hit further by AIG. And this is happening very unfairly: people who are actually to blame – especially Timothy Geithner – is unfairly throwing the blame on Dodd!

The controversy stems from a new NYT article:

The administration official said the Treasury Department did its own legal analysis and concluded that those contracts could not be broken. The official noted that even a provision recently pushed through Congress by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, had an exemption for such bonus agreements already in place.

Campaign Diaries explains why this is outrageous:

In February, Chris Dodd had introduced an amendment to the stimulus bill that would have imposed retroactive bonus caps on companies receiving bailout money – meaning that bonuses agreed to before February 11th would also fall under the legislation’s scope. As numerous news stories attest to, Geithner and Larry Summers both called Dodd, urging him to drop retroactivity. Dodd nonetheless pushed through the amendment (SA 354 to H.R.1) but it was then thrown out during the conference committee. (Jane Hamsher provides a clear and detailed documentation of this sequence of events.) …

[Now, in that NYT story,] a Treasury official is telling the media that there is no way to stop the AIG bonuses because the stimulus bill does not make restrictions radioactive. The official claims that Dodd is responsible for the provision’s ineffectiveness, but, as I explained above, it is Dodd who was trying to introduce radioactivity in the bill and the Treasury (via Geithner) who beat back his efforts to do so! In short: Geithner is deflecting his responsibility on one of the most endangered Democratic Senators of the 2010 cycle.

I know there is a lot of disagreement as to whether Dodd is actually vulnerable, whether Simmons could possibly beat him, but we can’t deny that the Senator’s numbers are truly dismal and that this is the sort of scandal that can drive him further down a hole – especially in the current context.

We’re seeing people like Paterson or Corzine lose their popularity and become VERY endangered in 2009/2010 because of the fiscal crisis. Senators are generally more protected, but Dodd is definitely on the front lines since he is the Chairman of the Banking Committee. For Treasury to (unfairly) throw the blame on a vulnerable Democratic Senator could definitely be a tremendous help for the GOP and it could lead to a whole cycle of anti-Dodd stories in Connecticut, so Treasury’s actions are really incomprehensible to me.

Do you think Dodd will be able to deflect the blame on this one? Or will it feed the growing anti-Dodd frenzy?

http://www.courant.com/news/po…

Titles says it all really. SImmons is officially in. If I was Sen. Dodd, I would consider retirement and let A.G. Richard Blumenthal or Rep. Chris Murphy have a crack at it.

Tough break for team blue. Still, if defense is only Connecticut and Deleware if Castle enters (Nevada GOP has no bench and the best of the Colorado GOP has passed) this still looks like a decent cycle for us. Dem +3 would be enough to let us run roughshod with our agenda for two years.

This is the first in what will hopefully be a series of diaries examining the results of the Democratic victory in the 2006 midterm election.  Particular attention will be given to the margin of victory to locate GOP targets and Democratic defends for 2008.

Today we will be looking at the Democratic takeover of New England

2004

2006

More after the flip.

Perhaps more striking than Democrats taking 6 House seats from Republican incubments in New England is just how close (6645 votes) Democrats came to a shutout taking the CT-04 from moderate Republican Christ Shays.  In Massachusetts Republicans didn’t even bother to run candidate in 6 of 10 House races, and elsewhere relatively few races were close.  Below I have created a shaded map to indicate vote margin, both Red and Blue are divided into 3 shades.  The lightest shade of red or blue indicates that the races was decided by less than 5%, the medium shade is less than 10%, and the darkest shade indicates the victory was over 10%.

Looking through races contested in both 2004 and 2006 (and excluding VT-AL due it being held by Independent Bernie Sanders in 2004) a clearer picture of the wave that swept Democrats into seats previously held by Republicans can be seen.

The single largest vote gain (in % terms) by a Democrat between 2004 and 2006 was in the CT-05 where the Democratic vote share surged 34% from 38.2% in 2004 to 56.2% in 2006.  In the CT-02 the Democratic candidate still hold a narrow lead, however the race has not yet been called.  In the CT-04, Chris Shays had a near (career) death experience, winning his race by a mere 3.2%.  As the lone remaining Republican in New England he should be a target for Democratic defection, with active efforts to woo him.  And if he won’t make the change, then he needs to end up like Lincoln Chaffee.

In New Hampshire Democratic candidate eked out narrow victories.  In the NH-01, the margin of victory was 3.1%  a 29.9% gain over the 36.6% showing of the Democratic candidate in 2004.  In the NH-02, Paul Hodes’s margin of victory was 6.1%, a 26.2% improvement over that 2004 showing at 38.2% for the Democratic candidate.

Looking forward to 2008, the CT-04, the sole remaining Republican seat in New England should be a pickup target if Shays doesn’t have the sense to do what’s right.  Democratic victories in the CT-05, NH-01, NH-02, and VT-AL will have to be defended because they all are likely Republican pickup targets with 2006 victory margins under 10 points.  Once the status of the CT-02 has been resolved we’ll know whether this is a seat that we will need to defend or a pickup opportunity.

For all the talk of a Solid South with Republicans dominating, nothing comes close to the level of victory that Democrats have achieved in New England.  New England Republicans at the federal level are on the brink of extinction, if Democratic candidates who took Republican seats concentrate on constituent service to build up an incumbency advantage we will be able to speak of a total realignment in New England.

That’s it for New England.  My next diary will focus on New York.   The ETA for that should be sometime next week.