Tag: Chris Christie

New York Times (pdf) (10/9-14, likely voters):

Jon Corzine (D-inc): 40

Chris Christie (R): 37

Chris Daggett (I): 13

Undecided: 10

(MoE: ±5%)

The New York Times takes its first poll of the New Jersey governor’s race and the topline gives Jon Corzine the biggest lead he’s seen since January (a whopping 3). The NYT also gives results with leaners pushed (40-39-14, for Corzine) and with Chris Daggett ommitted (46-43 for Corzine, with 3% volunteering Daggett). Corzine’s favorables are appalling, at 30/46, but Chris Christie has completely collapsed through the floor lately, as his favorables are now even worse at 19/37 (Daggett is little known but at least in positive territory, at 13/10).

SurveyUSA (10/12-14, likely voters, 10/5-7 in parentheses):

Jon Corzine (D-inc): 39 (40)

Chris Christie (R): 40 (43)

Chris Daggett (I): 18 (14)

Undecided: 3 (2)

(MoE: ±4%)

SurveyUSA finds what most everyone else is finding, which is a 1-point lead for Christie, but they also give Chris Daggett the highest mark any pollster has seen, at 18. SurveyUSA gives regional crosstabs, which confirm what other pollsters have seen (Corzine leads in the north, Christie leads in the south), but they also give us one of the most unusual crosstabs of the race so far: Bruce Springsteen fans favor Corzine 44-33, while Bruce non-fans favor Christie 47-33. Guess who Corzine should beg to campaign on his behalf?

Nevertheless, Corzine does have an array of sub-Bruce luminaries coming in on his behalf, starting with Bill Clinton, at two appearances on Tuesday. In addition to Barack Obama’s scheduled Wednesday appearance, Joe Biden will be back for a third appearance on Monday, and Caroline Kennedy will appear with Corzine at an Irish-American festival on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, rumors are flying that New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg will cross the Hudson and get involved with an endorsement. What the rumors don’t address, however, is who exactly Bloomberg would be endorsing — conceivably, it could be any of the three candidates. Daggett, however, as the underfunded independent and the least-known of the three, would obviously have the most to gain from the endorsement, and is likely also to be the one most ideologically in step with the superficially post-partisan Bloomberg. With or without an endorsement, PPP’s Tom Jensen thinks Daggett can hang on to most of his current support; he looks back at polling of 3rd party gubernatorial candidates (ranging from Anthony Pollina to Kinky Friedman) and finds little falloff between polls and the actual result.

On the still-developing Chris Christie living-large front, one more embarrassing detail has surfaced: many of Christie’s lavish business expenses were signed-off by his deputy Michele Brown (including the $700 round-trip limo ride between NYC and Atlantic City). That’s the same Brown that Christie gave the undisclosed mortgage loan to.

RaceTracker: NJ-Gov

• CA-Sen: What’s with the California politicians who are too busy to vote? Carly Fiorina has previously conceded that she didn’t vote in all elections, but today her camp is admitting that she didn’t vote at all in the period between 1989 and 1999.

• CT-Sen: After a mediocre fundraising quarter (of course, between prostate cancer and pinch-hitting at the helm of the HELP committee, he may have had better things to do), Chris Dodd is getting some high-level help. Barack Obama will appear on Dodd’s behalf at a fundraiser in Connecticut next week.

• FL-Sen: Two very different pictures of where Charlie Crist’s approval stands, from different pollster. Insider Advantage finds his approval at a puzzlingly low 48/41,and 55/38 among Republicans. (They didn’t poll the primary or general.) On the other hand, a poll by Republican pollster Cherry Communications on behalf of the Florida Chamber of Commerce finds 62/28. Meanwhile, Charlie Crist’s losing streak among the party base continued, as Marco Rubio racked up a big win with the Palm Beach GOP, winning their straw poll 90-17. (While most of the straw polls have happened in rural, teabaggy places, this is moderate, country club terrain, where Crist should play better.) Interestingly, ex-NH Senator Bob Smith, whose existence most people, me included, had forgotten about, pulled in 11 votes.

• NV-Sen: Facing bad poll numbers but armed with gigantic piles of cash, Harry Reid has already started advertising for his re-election. Despite his decades in office, he’s running a TV spot basically intended to introduce himself to Nevada, seeing as how many of the state’s residents have moved in since the last time he was elected in 2004.

• NY-Sen-B: Kirsten Gillibrand reported another large cash haul this quarter, bringing in $1.6 mil and sitting on $4.1 mil CoH. Nevertheless, she still needs to work on introducing herself to her constituents (granted, there’s a lot of them); a Newsday/Siena poll of Long Islanders find that she has a favorable of 23/27, with 50 saying they don’t know.

• OH-Sen: Ex-Rep. Rob Portman doubled up on Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher in the money chase in Ohio, raising $1.3 million to $620K for Fisher. Portman will still need to get past wealthy auto dealer Tom Ganley in the primary, though, who’s pledging to spend up to $7 million of his own money on the race, which could drain Portman nicely before he faces off against a Democrat. No word yet from Fisher’s Dem opponent, SoS Jennifer Brunner, although the fact that she just replaced her campaign finance team can’t be an encouraging sign.

• PA-Sen: This would be a big ‘get’ for Joe Sestak if he were running in Connecticut: Ned Lamont, whose successful primary defeat of Joe Lieberman in 2006 established some precedent for Sestak, gave Sestak his endorsement.

• CT-Gov: Jodi Rell is not looking much like a candidate for re-election, if her fundraising is any indication; she raised just $14K over the last quarter. The Dems in the race (who are running with or without a Rell retirement), Stamford mayor Dan Malloy and SoS Susan Bysiewicz, have each raised over $100K.

• FL-Gov: The poll paid for by the Florida Chamber of Commerce, mentioned above, also took a look at the Florida governor’s race. They see GOP AG Bill McCollum beating Dem state CFO Alex Sink, 42-35.

• NJ-Gov: Rasmussen polls the New Jersey gubernatorial race again, and there’s a pretty important distinction between their results with and without leaners pushed. Their topline numbers are 45 for Chris Christie, 41 for Jon Corzine, and 9 for Chris Daggett, a bit more Christie-favorable than what else we’ve seen this week. However, in Rasmussen’s words, “when voters are asked their initial choice,” it’s a 38-38 tie between Christie and Corzine, with 16 for Daggett. This should superficially cheer Democrats, but it also points to some hope for Christie, in that it shows just how soft a lot of Daggett’s support is. (Rasmussen also finds that 57% of Daggett’s supporters say they could change their minds before Election Day.)

• WY-Gov: Gov. Dave Freudenthal is at least offering some sort of timeline on deciding whether to seek a third term, but we’ll need to wait a long time. He says he’ll let us know after the end of the next legislative session, in March; the end of the filing period is May 28. He also didn’t offer much insight into when he’d set about challenging the state’s term limits law in court (a challenge he’d be expected to win, but one that could be time-consuming) if he did decide to run.

• FL-10: The retirement speculation surrounding 79-year-old Rep. Bill Young isn’t going to go away with his fundraising haul this quarter: only $4,500, with $419K on hand. He’s also giving away money (to the tune of $10,000) to the NRCC, despite facing a strong challenge next year. Unfortunately, his Dem challenger, state Sen. Charlie Justice, had a second straight lackluster quarter of his own, bringing in $77K for $101K CoH.

• FL-19: A roundup from the newly-merged CQ/Roll Call looks at the quickly developing field in the dark-blue 19th, for a special election to replace the soon-to-resign Robert Wexler. The big question is whether Wexler throws his support behind state Sen. Peter Deutch; Deutch won Wexler’s old state Senate seat (which covers more than half the 19th) in 2006 partly due to Wexler’s endorsement. West Palm Beach mayor Lois Frankel is another possibility; so too are Broward County mayor Stacy Ritter and state Sen. Jeremy Ring, although their Broward County bases don’t overlap as well with the 19th. Broward County Commissioner Ben Graber (who finished 3rd in the 1996 primary that Wexler won) is already in the race.

• LA-02: Um, what? GOP Rep. Joe Cao will be appearing with Barack Obama in New Orleans at several events today. While it’s apparently customary for presidents to invite local lawmakers to appearances in their districts, it’s also customary for members of the opposition party to decline. Cao, however, probably sees hitching his wagon to Obama as at least a faint hope of staving off defeat in this strongly Democratic district. Cao’s fundraising numbers for last quarter were pretty good, with $394K raised, but his burn rate was terrible, churning through nearly all of it ($382K) with high costs for direct mail fundraising.

• NY-01: We could have a real races on our hands in the 1st, where Democratic Rep. Tim Bishop’s Republican challenger Randy Altschuler reported $659K in the third quarter. Of course, $450K of that was from his own pocket, and a grand total of one donor was actually from within the 1st, with the bulk of the rest of the money coming from Manhattan.

• Census: David Vitter, who, with Robert Bennett, is leading the Republican charge to get the Census to ask respondents about their citizenship status, has decided to modify his amendment to this year’s appropriations package after one of the academics who he was relying on said that such a measure would scare off respondents from participating in the census at all. Not that it would matter, since it’s not likely to get an up-or-down vote, and Commerce Sec. Gary Locke already made clear that it’s way too late to make changes to the 2010 forms, which have already been printed and shipped.

• Polling: PPP’s Tom Jensen notes, that generally, Republicans aren’t picking up any new voters; the main problem with the upcoming New Jersey and Virginia elections is that Democrats have disproportionately lost interest. If the 2008 voter universes still applied in NJ and VA, Democrats would be winning both races handily.

Chris Christie really has been living large – too large:

The Republican candidate for New Jersey governor, who has campaigned on a platform of ethical integrity and cutting government waste, regularly spent beyond federal guidelines on business travel while U.S. attorney, records show.

The newly released travel records show that Chris Christie occasionally billed taxpayers more than $400 a night for stays in luxury hotels and exceeded the government’s hotel allowance on 14 of 16 business trips he took in 2008.

“Generally, U.S. attorneys, assistant U.S. attorneys and all federal staff stay within the government rate,” said Justice Department spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz. “The government rate is not a suggestion, it’s a guideline.”

And look who else bunked with Christie at high-end rates:

On trips in 2007 and 2008, his top deputy, Michele Brown, also exceeded the guidelines after Christie approved her requests for rooms in the same five-star hotels where he was booked.

The vouchers show Christie and Brown stayed at the NineZero Hotel in Boston on Oct. 16, 2007 and each billed taxpayers $449 plus taxes and fees for their rooms, more than double the government allowance for a Boston hotel room at the time, according to a General Services Administration travel reimbursement table.

Yes, that Michele Brown. No word yet, though, on Christie’s room service tab.

In other NJ-Gov news:

• Barack Obama will campaign with Jon Corzine on Wednesday, Oct. 21st, at 3pm at Farleigh Dickinson University in Hackensack. Tom Jensen points out that the few remaining undecideds in NJ voted for Obama by a 50-40 margin, so it’s key for Corzine to try to mobilize them.
• Quinnipiac’s new survey shows the race at 41-40 Christie, with Chris Daggett pulling in 14. Christie had a 43-39 lead just a couple of weeks ago.
• And in an unsurprising sign that Republicans are worried about Daggett drawing away votes from Christie, the RGA is hitting the independent with both radio and TV attack ads. For its part, the DGA is going after Christie hard on mammograms.

• AZ-Sen: Does the persistent rumor of a J.D. Hayworth primary challenge to John McCain boil down to nothing more than a Hayworth grudge against former key McCain aide Mark Salter (and thus a way for Hayworth to keep yanking McCain’s chain)? That’s what the Arizona Republic is proposing, pointing to a 2005 dust-up between Hayworth and Salter over immigration reform. Hayworth, for his part, says that “spite” would never fuel a primary bid.

• IL-Sen: GOP Rep. Mark Kirk is touting an internal poll taken for him by Magellan Data and Mapping Strategies that has him beating Democratic state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias in a Senate head-to-head, 42-35. It also shows Kirk in strong shape in the primary, leading developer Patrick Hughes (who seems to be cornering the wingnut vote) 61-3.

• KY-Sen: The allegedly third tape (although nobody seems to remember what the second one was) involving Lt. Gov. and Senate candidate Dan Mongiardo trashing his boss (and one of his few endorsers), Gov. Steve Beshear, has surfaced. This time, Mongiardo says people he talks to want to “yell” about Beshear and says, “It’s like being married to a whore.” This time it popped up directly on YouTube instead of on a Rand Paul fan blog.

• NV-Sen: Markos has an interesting observation, that may give some comfort to the Reid boys as they face an onslaught of bad polls. Democrats now have a registration edge of nearly 100,000 in Nevada, and it’s growing: since February, Dems have added 4,860 while the GOP has added 1,549. In fact, this sad performance puts the GOP fourth, as both nonpartisan registration and the right-wing Independent American Party gained more new registrants.

• PA-Sen (pdf): One more poll from Dane & Associates via GrassrootsPA, and it gives narrow edges to both Arlen Specter and Joe Sestak over Republican ex-Rep. Pat Toomey in the 2010 Senate race (46-43 for Specter and 43-38 for Sestak). Worth noting: this is only the second poll (after that freaky Rasmussen poll in August) that shows Sestak performing better against Toomey than does Specter.

• TX-Sen, Gov: Kay Bailey Hutchison may be getting some cold feet about committing to a resignation date from the Senate. In response to questions on a conservative radio talk show, it’s sounding like she’s unlikely to resign her seat by year’s end. However, she also doesn’t sound like she’ll stay in her seat all the way through to the gubernatorial primary election in March, saying “that’s not what [she wants] to do.” (Although it’s understandable she may want to keep her day job if the whole being-governor thing doesn’t work out.)

• NJ-Gov: PPP has its poll of the New Jersey gubernatorial race out, and like everyone else these days, they’re seeing it as pure tossup. Chris Christie leads Jon Corzine 40-39, with 13 for independent Chris Daggett. (It’s right in line with today’s Pollster.com average of 41-40 for Christie.)That’s tremendous progress for Corzine, who was down 44-35-13 last month. Also, it’s worth noting that not only is Corzine dragging Christie down to his level but he’s actually starting to improve his own favorables; he’s up to 37/55, still terrible but better than last month’s 32/60. The race will still depend on getting unlikely Dem voters to turn out; the likely voter pool went for Obama by only 4% last year, way off from the actual 15% margin. One last tidbit: the poll asks Daggett voters their second choice, and Christie wins that one 48-34 (suggesting that Daggett does more damage to Christie, but that Christie’s best hope is to peel off some of the vacillating Daggett supporters).

• VA-Gov: Not much change in Virginia, where Rasmussen finds a 50-43 lead for Republican Bob McDonnell in that gubernatorial race. (This is right in line with today’s Pollster.com average of 51-43.) Two weeks ago, Rasmussen found that McD led Creigh Deeds 51-42.

• FL-08: This seems kind of surprising, given freshman Rep. Alan Grayson’s over-the-top invitations to rumble (or who knows… maybe being aggressive actually works to cow Republicans?). After a lot of public vacillating, it turns out that Republican former state Sen. Daniel Webster, considered the strongest contender to go up against Grayson, won’t run. Rich guys Jerry Pierce and Armando Gutierrez Jr. are in the race, but the establishmenet Plan D (with Webster, state House speaker Larry Cretul, and Orange Co. Mayor Rich Crotty out) seems likely to fall to state Rep. Stephen Precourt, who expressed interest but said he’d defer to Webster.

• NC-11: Looks like businessman Jeff Miller declined for a good reason yesterday, as the GOP nailed down a stronger-sounding competitor to go up against Rep. Heath Shuler in the R+6 11th. Greg Newman, the mayor of Hendersonville (pop. 10,000 in 2000) since 2005, says he’ll take on Shuler.

• SC-05: State Sen. Mick Mulvaney looks ready to launch his candidacy, most likely on the 17th at a GOP gathering in the district. He’ll take on 27-year incumbent and House Budget chair John Spratt.

• TN-St. House: There’s a small House special election in Tennessee tonight, with big stakes. HD 62, located in rural south central Tennessee (its major town is Shelbyville) was vacated by a Democrat, Curt Cobb, who resigned to take a better-paying job; Cobb’s brother Ty is facing off against Republican Pat Marsh. It’s GOP leaning territory, though (this is part of the 6th CD, which had a very sharp Democratic falloff in 2008). The stakes are high because the Democrats hold the chamber by a 1-vote margin, 50-49, thanks only to a power-sharing arrangement with renegade Republican Kent Williams who serves as the Speaker elected with Democratic votes. A Republican victory here could give control of the House back to the GOP, if they’re able to reorganize in midterm. If the Republicans can control the state House and pick up the governor’s office in 2010, they’ll control the resdistricting trifecta.

• Mayors: One other election on the docket in Tennessee tonight Thursday: Shelby Co. Mayor A.C. Wharton is looking likely to become the new mayor in Memphis. Polling has him leading Mayor Pro Tem Myron Lowery by a wide margin. (There are 25 candidates in the race, including professional wrestler Jerry Lawler.) The mayoral job was vacated, of course, by long-time mayor Willie Herenton, who after several abortive attempts to resign in the past is leaving to challenge Rep. Steve Cohen in a primary.

• CO-Sen: Here’s an amateur-level mistake from the Bennet campaign: electioneering in the Denver public schools (where Michael Bennet used to be Supernintendo before being appointed Senator). The campaign sent mailings to a school asking for the principal’s support and fliers were given to principals at a district workshop.

• FL-Sen: The Kendrick Meek campaign is touting its own fishy poll that says that Meek leads Charlie Crist… among voters who know both of them. The lead is 45-43 for Meek among those 25% of the sample who know who the heck Meek is. In the larger sample, Crist is up 47-31.

• KS-Sen: Kansas Senate news three digests in a row? I’m as surprised as you are. Anyway, retired advertising executive and journalist Charles Schollenberger confirmed that he will run for the Senate. With seemingly no Dems higher up the totem pole interested in the race, Schollenberger may wind up carrying the flag.

• NC-Sen: It’s not quite confirmed, but the rumor mill is churning up stories that youthful former state Senator and Iraq vet Cal Cunningham is moving to formally jump into the North Carolina Senate race. SoS Elaine Marshall is already in the Democratic primary field.

• PA-Sen: There’s an unexpected fourth Democratic participant in the Senate primary all of a sudden: Doris Smith-Ribner, a recently retired Commonwealth Court (which apparently is one of two intermediate appellate courts in Pennsylvania; don’t ask me why there are two) judge for two decades. Her presence could prove nettlesome to Rep. Joe Sestak, by eating a bit into his share of liberal anti-Arlen Specter votes in what’s likely to be a close primary. (“Fourth,” you say? State Rep. Bill Kortz is running too, and has been for many months.)

• AZ-Gov: He was probably seeing the same terrible polls that everyone else was, and ex-Governor Fife Symington decided to put the kibbosh on a gubernatorial comeback. Instead, Symington endorsed not the current Governor, Jan Brewer, but one of her minor opponents, former state GOP chair John Munger.

• CA-Gov: Meg Whitman scored a victory of sorts with the publication of a story titled “Meg Whitman’s voting record not as bad as originally portrayed.” It turns out she was registered at several points in California in the 1980s and 1990s, but there’s still no indication that she actually voted during this period.

Meanwhile, Whitman’s primary rival ex-Rep. Tom Campbell may get a big leg up: rumors persist that he may get picked as California’s new Lt. Governor (once John Garamendi gets elected to CA-10). I’d initially thought that was a way of scraping him out of the gubernatorial primary and giving him a door prize, but it could give him a higher profile and bully pulpit to compensate for his vast financial disadvantage as he stays in the race. Campbell was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Finance Director for a while, and they operate in the same centrist space, so maybe Ahnold would do him the favor? (Of course, he’d still have to survive confirmation by the Dem-controlled legislature, who might be reluctant to promote Campbell, who they rightly see as the most dangerous general election opponent.)

• FL-Gov: It had seemed like state Sen. Paula Dockery, who threatened repeatedly during the spring to run in the GOP gubernatorial primary, had faded back into the woodwork. However, she’s front and center again today, saying that she’s “leaning toward” running and giving herself a three-week timeline (she put off the decision because of her husband’s surgery this summer). Another minor embarrassment for her primary opponent, AG Bill McCollum: the co-chair of his campaign, former state GOP chair Alex Cardenas, had to explain that, no, he didn’t actually host a fundraiser for Democratic rival Alex Sink. (It was hosted by Democratic partners in Cardenas’s lobbying firm.)

• NJ-Gov: Jon Corzine and Chris Christie have sufficiently reduced each other’s statures that the state’s largest newspaper, the Newark Star-Ledger, took what may be an unprecedented step, and endorsed the independent candidate in the race: Chris Daggett. I still can’t see this giving Daggett the momentum to break 20%, but more Daggett votes are good, as they seem to come mostly out of the Christie column. Meanwhile, Chris Christie got an endorsement he may not especially want in the blue state of New Jersey — from the Family Research Council (who also just endorsed Conservative Doug Hoffman over Republican Dede Scozzafava in the NY-23 special election). Also, Christie is living large after getting an endorsement that may carry more weight, from the New Jersey Restaurant Association.

• VA-Gov (pdf): There’s one new poll of VA-Gov to report today: Mason-Dixon, and they come in with a 48-40 edge for Bob McDonnell over Creigh Deeds, closely tracking today’s Pollster.com average of 51-43. The poll finds Deeds getting only 81% of the African-American vote (with 9% to McD), far too little, especially in combination with what PPP‘s Tom Jensen is seeing, as he teases that he’s projecting abysmal black turnout of 12% in the coming election. At any rate, Deeds is now touting his underdog status in fundraising e-mails, and is alluding to more possible visits from Barack Obama in the stretch run.

• FL-20: Here’s an understatement: Republican candidate Robert Lowry, hoping to defeat Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz in this D+13 district, conceded it was a “mistake” to shoot at a target labeled “DWS” while at a Southeast Republican Club gathering at a gun range.

• MN-06: As state Sen. Tarryl Clark seems to be building a fundraising and labor endorsement edge, her primary opponent for the Democratic nomination, Maureen Reed, says she won’t follow traditional decorum and abide by the DFL endorsement. Reed (a former member of the Independence Party) says she’ll keep open the option of taking the fight all the way to the primary, a reversal of her position from months earlier (although from before Clark got into the race and Elwyn Tinklenberg left). (UPDATE: The Reed campaign writes in to say that the Minnesota Public Radio story that underpins this story is incorrect and that Reed never stated whether or not she would abide by the DFL endorsement.)

• NC-11: One reddish southern district where the Republicans are still at square one on recruitment is the 11th. Businessman Jeff Miller said that he won’t challenge sophomore Dem Heath Shuler.

• NY-15: As ethics allegations take a toll against long-time Rep. Charlie Rangel, he’s getting a primary challenge… from his former campaign director. Vince Morgan, now a banker, says “it’s time for a change.”

• OH-17: Republicans may have found someone to run in the 17th against Rep. Tim Ryan: businessman and Air Force vet Bill Johnson, who’s now exploring the race and will decide in December. Ryan probably isn’t too worried, as he’s won most of his races with over 75%, in this D+12 district.

• PA-04: Pennsylvania Western District US Attorney Mary Buchanan is reportedly considering running as a Republican against Dem sophomore Jason Altmire. (Hopefully she isn’t violating the Hatch Act too much while she considers it.) Buchanan was one of the USAs who weren’t fired in the Bush-era purge (in fact, she allegedly helped consult on the list of those who were fired). State House minority whip Mike Turzai has been reputed to be the GOP’s desired recruit here, but Buchanan’s flack says that Turzai is focused on winning back GOP control of the state House in 2010 instead.

• PA-11: Attorney and hedge fund manager Chris Paige is the first Republican to take on Paul Kanjorski (or Corey O’Brien, if Kanjorski goes down in the Dem primary). Still no word on whether Hazleton mayor Lou Barletta is interested in yet another whack at the race.

• Supreme Courts (pdf): News from two different state supreme court races? Sure, why not. In Pennyslvania, there’s another Dane & Associates poll out, of a hotly contested 2010 race for a state supreme court seat; Democrat Jack Panella leads Republican Joan Orie Melvin 38-35. Also, in Texas, Democrat Bill Moody, who came close to winning a seat in 2006 (better than any other Dem statewide candidate that year), will try again in 2010, and he has an interesting new campaign gimmick: he’s going to tour the state in a big orange blimp.

• FL-Sen: Here’s something of an ooops from Bob Mendendez at the DSCC: his comments last week where he seemed to leave out the possibility of a pickup in the open seat race in Florida prompted former Miami mayor Maurice Ferre to jump into the race, saying “You can’t write off Florida” (or at least that’s what Ferre said was the impetus, although that doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you do with less than a week of planning). This week, the DSCC is saying that Menendez misspoke and that they’re pleased with Kendrick Meek’s fundraising so far.

• KS-Sen: You might remember that yesterday we said that Democratic state Treasurer Dennis McKinney hadn’t ruled out running for Senate. However, a source close to McKinney tells us that McKinney (who was appointed after previous GOP Treasurer Lynn Jenkins was elected to KS-02) plans to run for Treasurer in 2010.

• CT-Gov: Jodi Rell is facing some possible ethical trouble; Democrats accuse her of spending state money for political purposes by hiring pollsters to do focus groups on the state budget, and have referred the matter to the Office of State Ethics. The polling seemed to veer into politics in terms of message-testing and looking at perceptions of AG Richard Blumenthal, a possible Democratic opponent. Rell has formed an exploratory committee for re-election, but we’re still waiting to see if she follows through; stuff like this may help chip away at her veneer of inevitability.

• MN-Gov: Here’s a first: someone’s not running for Minnesota governor. St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman decided against trying to wade into the crowded Democratic primary field, saying his work as mayor wasn’t done.

• NJ-Gov: One more pollster finds a super-tight gubernatorial race in New Jersey. Neighborhood Research, a Republican pollster (but not working for the Christie campaign) finds Chris Christie leading Jon Corzine only 36-35, with Chris Dagget pulling in 11. Their previous poll last month gave Christie a 4-point edge. Corzine’s campaign has apparently succeeded in making Christie just as widely disliked as Corzine — Christie’s favorables have dropped to 28%, equal to Corzine’s. Also, it doesn’t look like Sarah Palin will get to ride to Chris Christie’s rescue: the Christie and McDonnell camps have both given a “thanks but not thanks” to her offer of help, according to Politico.

• PA-Gov: GrassrootsPA, the rightosphere’s Pennsylvania outpost, commissioned a poll through Dane & Associates to see how Republican AG Tom Corbett matches up against his Democratic rivals (no Jim Gerlach head-to-heads, unfortunately). The sample size is a teeny-weeny 200, but the numbers line up with other polling: the closest race is with fellow statewide official, Auditor Jack Wagner, who trails Corbett 41-37. Corbett leads Philly businessman Tom Knox 44-36, Allegheny Co. Executive Dan Onorato 44-32, and ex-Rep. Joe Hoeffel 53-27.

• VA-Gov: Lots of poll watchers were waiting for the newest Washington Post poll of the Virginia race to come out, to see if it gave more favorable numbers to Creigh Deeds than we saw out of recent Rasmussen and SurveyUSA polls. WaPo tended to be a bit more favorable to Deeds, but they’re seeing what everyone else is seeing: Bob McDonnell now leads 53-44. Looks like whatever traction Deeds got post-thesis-gate has drifted away.

• WY-Gov: The main story in Wyoming is that everyone is still waiting to see whether Dave Freudenthal challenges Wyoming’s term limits law and goes for a third term. Former GOP state Rep. Ron Micheli is running regardless, as we reported recently, but there are a few other behind-the-scenes moves going on. State House Speaker Colin Simpson (and son of Sen. Alan Simpson), at some point, filed to open an exploratory committee (and would probably be GOP frontrunner if he got in). On the Democratic side, state Sen. Mike Massie has been touring the state rounding up support (with Freudenthal’s blessing), but says he won’t create an exploratory committee until he knows Freudenthal isn’t running.

• CA-03: Elk Grove city councilor Gary Davis has dropped his bid for the Democratic nomination in the 3rd, to go up against Rep. Dan Lungren (who squeaked by in 2008). Davis didn’t seem to be making much fundraising headway against physician Ami Bera and public utility executive Bill Slaton.

• CA-10: Republicans are hanging on to some glimmers of hope in the special election in the 10th, offering up an internal poll from David Harmer’s camp, by Wilson Research. The poll shows Harmer within single digits of Democratic Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, 41-34. (It also claims that, once you adjust for the 35% share that the GOP got in the primary, it closes to a 2-pt gap.)

• FL-24: Another three-way primary got less crowded, this time on the Republican side. State Rep. Dorothy Hukill decided to end her campaign for the primary to go up against Democratic freshman Suzanne Kosmas; Hukill will run for re-election instead. That leaves fellow state Rep. Sandy Adams, and Winter Park city councilor Karen Diebel in the Republican field.

• IN-02: It looks like Republican state Rep. Jackie Wolarski (generally known as “Wacky Jackie”) is set to launch her campaign against sophomore Rep. Joe Donnelly. She says she’s leaning in that direction and will open an exploratory committee by Monday.

• KS-02: The Democrats have nailed down a solid recruit to go up against Great White Dope Lynn Jenkins in the 2nd. State senator Laura Kelly, who has represented a Topeka-area district since 2004, announced today that she will try to reclaim the seat lost by Nancy Boyda last year.

• NY-19: This could get inconvenient for Republican Assemblyman Greg Ball, who’s going up against Rep. John Hall in this swing district. The New York Democratic Lawyers Council filed an FEC complaint against Ball this week, alleging a series of illegal solicitations, improper automatic phone calls, and illegal use of Assembly resources for his congressional campaign.

• NY-23: The establishment/hardliner schism continues unabated in the 23rd, where state Conservative Party chair Michael Long has sent around a memo calling on other conservative activists to stop funding the NRCC until it backs off its support for moderate Republican nominee Dede Scozzafava. However, Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling didn’t get the message; the former chair of the Republican Study Committee (the House GOP’s right-wing ideological caucus) gave his endorsement to Scozzafava, on purely pragmatic grounds (saying “she’s the only Republican who can win”). This endorsement probably won’t resonate much outside the Beltway’s financial circles, though; I can’t imagine more than a handful of 23rd district residents know Hensarling’s name.

Democracy Corps (D) (10/6-7, likely voters, 9/22-23 in parens):

Jon Corzine (D-inc): 41 (39)

Chris Christie (R): 38 (40)

Chris Daggett (I): 14 (11)

Undecided: 7 (9)

(MoE: ±4%)

That’s the second poll this week which has shown Jon Corzine with the slimmest of leads. And, as happened on Tuesday, there’s also another poll alongside this one showing Corzine just behind.

SurveyUSA (10/5-7, likely voters, no trendlines):

Jon Corzine (D-inc): 40

Chris Christie (R): 43

Chris Daggett (I): 14

Undecided: 2

(MoE: ±4%)

Unfortunately, this is SUSA’s first poll of NJ-Gov, so we have no trendlines here. But they’re seeing the same thing as everyone else – a very close race:

Back when we last changed our rating on this race, we were at the point on the Pollster chart where the distance between the red and blue lines had been getting wider and wider, and was in fact at the widest it had ever been – “peak Christie,” you might call it. At the time, we felt that this race exhibited a number of signs that set it apart from the usual “unloved Jersey Dem comes back in the end” storyline. Yet we did conclude with this remark:

This doesn’t mean we think Corzine can’t stage a comeback, or that Christie has this one in the bag. It simply means that he has the edge right now, something which seems hard to deny at this point. But if that changes, our rating will, too.

Well, things have changed. True, Corzine’s popularity still sucks, and so does the economy. But it turns out Chris Christie wound up being a whole lot suckier. His non-stop parade of ethical lapses and his utter failure to articulate any kind of vision for the Garden State have proven that as a candidate – dare I say it? – he’s a lightweight. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal has hammered him for his “empty” campaign. In retrospect, though, I suppose we shouldn’t have expected much more than this from a handpicked Karl Rove-brand US Attorney.

The other factor, of course, is the emergence of independent Chris Daggett, who has almost certainly been siphoning off a good helping of anti-incumbent discontent. SUSA, interestingly, shows that similar proportions of folks who voted for Corzine in 2005 and his Republican opponent, Doug Forrester, are defecting to Daggett. But both my intuition and Daggett’s overall trendlines make me think that if he weren’t in the race, plenty of Democrats would still be defecting but fewer Republicans would be. In other words, Daggett offers an escape valve for some anti-Corzine votes that would otherwise go to Christie.

Add in Corzine’s considerable money advantage and it’s enough for us to conclude that this race is anybody’s game. So we’re moving NJ-Gov back to “Tossup.” Election night should be a wild ride.

Fairleigh Dickinson (9/28-10/5, likely voters, no trend lines):

Jon Corzine (D-inc): 38

Chris Christie (R): 37

Chris Daggett (I): 17

Undecided: 16

(MoE: ±4%)

FDU didn’t include Chris Daggett in their previous month’s poll, so we can’t draw a clean trend line from these numbers. However, in a direct head-to-head, Corzine leads Christie by 44-43, up from 47-42 for Christie last month. Incredibly, this is the first time we’ve seen Corzine in the lead since January. There’s more, though.

Rasmussen Reports (10/5, likely voters, 9/21 in parens):

Jon Corzine (D-inc): 44 (41)

Chris Christie (R): 47 (48)

Chris Daggett (I): 6 (6)

Undecided: 3 (5)

(MoE: ±4%)

If there’s been a common thread over the past few weeks, it’s been that Christie’s numbers are beginning to come back down to earth, but that Corzine wasn’t actually gaining any support in most of the public polling. Now we have two polls suggesting that Corzine is ticking upward, and here’s how that looks in graphical form:

Getting better, but we’ll have more polling results in the coming days that will either corroborate the trend or point to something else. Hang on to your butts.

Monmouth University (PDF) (9/24-29, likely voters, 9/8-10 in parens):

Jon Corzine (D-inc): 40 (39)

Chris Christie (R): 43 (47)

Chris Daggett (I): 8 (5)

Undecided: 8 (7)

(MoE: ±4.3%)

As we’ve seen from some other polling firms, Corzine’s numbers haven’t really improved, but Christie’s keep dropping – take a look at the Pollster chart. Monmouth also shows the race tied among registered voters, 40-40.

Research 2000 for Daily Kos (9/28-9/30, likely voters, 8/3-5 in parens):

Jon Corzine (D-inc): 42 (40)

Chris Christie (R): 46 (48)

Chris Daggett (I): 7 (-)

Undecided: 5 (9)

(MoE: ±4%)

R2K didn’t ask about Daggett last time (which was a couple of months ago), but he seems to be drawing from Christie and the undecided column, rather than Corzine, which is good. Incidentally, “even the conservative” Wall Street Journal has a new editorial out tomorrow, hammering Christie for running an “empty” campaign. They hit him hardest for his failure to articulate any plans for dealing with Jersey’s high property taxes (this is the WSJ, after all) – hopefully this attack will resonate with the anti-tax GOP base and keep them home or spur them to vote Daggett. The WSJ finishes with this:

Even if Mr. Christie ekes out a win because Mr. Corzine is so unpopular, the Republican will arrive in Trenton with a mandate to do what he campaigned on – nothing.

Ouch! With friends like these….

• NH-Sen: Joe Biden will be on duty to help Paul Hodes (who hasn’t set the world on fire with his fundraising so far) at a DC fundraiser on Oct. 5.

• SC-Sen: Democrats appear to have a candidate with some financial heft to take on Sen. Jim DeMint next year. The Indigo Journal writes that Rock Hill attorney Chad McGowan recently told local Democrats that he’ll be running full-time for the Senate nomination beginning in early October. (J)

• CA-Gov: Looks like the period of meditation on the Governor’s race that Jerry Brown promised us didn’t take very long: he’s opening his exploratory committee today. Meanwhile, Meg Whitman managed to poach another member of the Steve Poizner camp; former state GOP chair and former Assembly minority leader Bob Naylor dropped his Poizner endorsement and switched to Whitman.

• NJ-Gov: Yet another pollster sees the same story developing in New Jersey (this time it’s Quinnipiac). The race is tightening to within the margin of error, but it’s not because Jon Corzine is getting much better (he’s still not breaking 40); instead, Chris Christie is slowly deflating, while moderate independent Chris Daggett gains. Today’s poll has Christie up 43-39-12, a definite improvement over last month’s 47-37-9.

• VA-Gov: Creigh Deeds is finally playing one of his aces in the hole: Sen. Mark Warner, who generally polls as by far the most popular political figure in the state, cut an ad for Deeds and will be campaiging for him on weekends. Deeds also got an endorsement which, superficially, seems like a big coup, but isn’t, really: former GOP governor Linwood Holton. (The moderate Holton is father-in-law to Tim Kaine and endorsed Barack Obama in 2008.)

• NH-02: It looks like ex-Rep. Charlie Bass is getting off the fence and moving closer to an effort to reclaim his old seat, which he lost to Paul Hodes in 2006 but will be an open seat in 2010. He’ll be opening his exploratory committee tomorrow. (Although — maybe this is a possible sign of ambivalence — he says he’s opening the committee because he needs somewhere by quarter’s end to put all the unsolicited checks he’s received lately, or else he’ll have to return them.) He’ll probably still face a primary against the more conservative 2008 candidate, Jennifer Horn, assuming he runs.

• NY-23: As expected, Gov. Paterson has set Nov. 3rd for the NY-23 special election, the same day as other elections in the state (such as the NYC mayoral race), and of course the gubernatorial races in NJ and VA. GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava also got an endorsement that falls into the “as expected” category: from the Main Street Partnership, the ideological caucus for the dwindling ranks of moderate House Republicans.

• PA-04, 08: Two sophomore Democrats in Pennsylvania both got Republican challengers. In the Pittsburgh suburbs’ R+6 4th, Keith Rothfus, a Republican lawyer and former Dept. of Homeland Security official, will challenge Rep. Jason Altmire. (Apparently the NRCC’s top recruit, state House minority whip Mike Turzai, has been balking so far.) Meanwhile, in the less challenging 8th in the Philly burbs, computer consultant Jeffrey Schott is slated to run against Rep. Patrick Murphy.