Tag: Todd Tiahrt

• CT-Sen: Gov. Jodi Rell just signed into law an important piece of legislation (and, in doing so, reduced her own power): from now on, in the event of a Senatorial vacancy, the void will be filled by a fast special election instead of a gubernatorial appointment. The farcical Rod Blagojevich affair in Illinois was apparently the genesis for this new law.

• KS-Sen: Rep. Todd Tiahrt, facing a big primary fight for the GOP nomination against fellow Rep. Jerry Moran, got a key endorsement that will help him out-conservative his red-state colleague, from prominent anti-abortion group Kansans for Life. Moran, meanwhile, got another establishment endorsement of questionable utility to the Kansas electorate, from South Dakota Sen. John Thune.

• NC-Sen: Insider Advantage polled Richard Burr’s approvals, and like many other pollsters (including PPP, the messenger that the Burr campaign has chosen to attack), found that Burr’s approvals are low and his unknowns are possibly catastrophically high. Burr clocked in at 39/31 approval, with 30% with no opinion.

• NH-Sen: John Sununu Sr. now says that John Sununu Jr. will make a decision (or will have his daddy make a decision for him, more likely) “within a week or so” as to whether or not he’ll run for Senate next year. Sr. also says that AG Kelly Ayotte will step aside if Jr. runs, which may be news to Ayotte. GOP insiders seem to think that odds are against Sununu running.

• OH-Sen: Rob Portman, G.W. Bush’s former trade rep and OMB Director, has taken on a strange approach to selling himself to voters: that he’s a consummate Washington insider, going so far as to say that he knows “where the bodies are buried” (way to write the opposition’s advertisements word-for-word for them!). In a state where there’s a lot of populist indignation over job losses and outsourcing, emphasizing your technocratic elitism is somewhere past tone-deaf and out in the realm of political malpractice.

• PA-Sen: More signs that the party is finally coalescing around Pat Toomey as nominee: another endorsement from one its sitting Reps., Joe Pitts. (Pitts is probably the most conservative GOPer left in the PA delegation, so no surprise here.)

• WV-Sen: With 91-year-old Robert Byrd still in the hospital, Gov. Joe Manchin sought to tamp down speculation that he was looking into potential replacement Senators (such as ex-Gov. Gaston Caperton).

• IL-Gov: Bob Schillerstrom became the third Republican this week to announce his gubernatorial candidacy. The DuPage County Board chairman had had an exploratory committee open for several months, so this was expected. A 4th entrant, State Sen. Kirk Dillard, also from Chicago’s western suburbs, says he’ll announce his candidacy on July 8.

• MI-Gov: A third Democratic candidate got into the governor’s race today: state Rep. (and former state Senator) Alma Wheeler Smith. Smith, who’s the only African-American in the field, also ran in the gubernatorial primary in 2002.

• NJ-Gov: Strategic Vision polled the New Jersey governor’s race; no surprises here, as they found Chris Christie beating Jon Corzine 51-39. Christie was also busy yesterday in Washington testifying before the House on the no-bid monitoring contracts that Christie awarded while US Attorney (including to his former boss, John Ashcroft); look for this to become a prime issue in the race (if Corzine has even half-a-clue how to campaign).

• NM-Gov, NM-02: Ex-Rep. Steve Pearce, last seen getting annihilated in last year’s Senate race, says he’s pushing back his announcement on whether he’ll run for governor, for his old House seat, or something else to somewhere between July 20 and July 27.

• PA-Gov: Here’s one state where the gubernatorial field is actually managing to get smaller: Lehigh County Executive Don Cunningham opted out of the Democratic primary race (and said that he isn’t interested in the Lt. Gov. slot). This may give a small boost to Philly-area businessman Tom Knox, as the Dem side’s two biggest-names, Allegheny Co. Exec Dan Onorato and state Auditor Jack Wagner are both from the Pittsburgh area.

• CA-10: Rep. Ellen Tauscher was finally confirmed as Undersecretary of State last night, after Sen. Jon Kyl dropped his hold on her. (She’s also getting married on Saturday, so it’s a big week.) Tauscher’s last day in the House is today, so this means the wheels are now officially in motion for the CA-10 special election.

• FL-12: Looks like the GOP will have a primary in the race to replace Rep. Adam Putnam, depsite their efforts to grease the skids for former state Rep. Dennis Ross. Polk Co. Commissioner Randy Wilkinson has been taking steps to enter the race as well.

• LA-03: Here’s a potential Dem contender for the potentially open seat currently occupied by Rep. Charlie Melancon, who hadn’t been mentioned in previous discussions (either from SSP or Roll Call or The Hill): Steve Angelle, who heads the state Natural Resources Department and used to be President of St. Martin Parish.

• SC-04: Rep. Bob Inglis is taking an unusual approach to a potentially bruising primary fight in 2010: instead of trying to out-conservative his opponents, he’s saying the GOP needs to “lose the stinking rot of self-righteousness.” In a Washington Wire interview, he said that the Mark Sanford Experience shows that “This may be an opportunity to extend a little grace to other people, to realize that maybe it’s not 100% this way or that way,” and referred to the Bob Inglis who was a zealous Clinton impeachment manager in 1998 as “Bob Inglis 1.0,” who was a “‘self-righteous’ expletive.”

• TN-09: Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton announced that he’ll be resigning his job on July 10 in order to campaign full-time in his primary challenge against Rep. Steve Cohen. Since Herenton has tried to resign (and changed his mind) at least once before, after five increasingly rocky terms in office, this sounds more like a relief to Herenton instead of giving something up.

• DCCC: The DCCC is running radio spots over the July 4 weekend against seven vulnerable House GOPers: Ken Calvert, Charlie Dent, Jim Gerlach, Dan Lungren, Mike McCaul, Lee Terry, and Joe Wilson. They’re getting attacked for voting for war supplementals during the Bush administration and now happening to vote against them now that a Demmycrat is in charge.

• The Tubes: Hotline On Call compares and contrasts the mellifluous email stylings of Gov. Sanford with the SMS billet-doux of Detroit ex-Mayor Kilpatrick. This outlines the foundational divide between email and texting: in SMS you automatically sound crazier, but it also prevents you from banging out divinity school dropout diatribes about First Corinthians. (Ben)

• TN-03: Paula Flowers, the former Tennessee Insurance Commissioner, formally announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination on Thursday. This is a tough district at R+13, but between it being an open seat (as Zach Wamp is running for governor) and Flowers’ statewide profile, we have a shot here.

• IL-13: Last year, businessman Scott Harper held Rep. Judy Biggert to a much closer than expected margin (54-44) without DCCC help, in this once solidly Republican district (which just plunged from R+5 to R+1). Harper filed an exploratory committee on Friday for a rematch. He can probably count on a higher-profile race this time, especially as strong fundraising might encourage the 71-year-old Biggert to think about retirement.

• MI-07: The GOP is still trying to settle on a challenger to freshman Rep. Mark Schauer in this rural Michigan district. Former Rep. Tim Walberg (who lost after one term to Schauer) seems to have dibs on the race, and state GOP chair Saul Anuzis is thinking he’ll do it again, but Walberg says he’s in no hurry to decide. Brad Smith, a lawyer who’s the son of the district’s former Rep. Nick Smith, seems to be taking shape as their fallback option.

• NJ-03: John Culbertson, a wealthy investor who was courted by the New Jersey GOP to run against frosh Democratic Rep. John Adler based on his capacity to self-fund, says he’s not interested in pursuing the race. (J)

• KS-Sen: I’m not exactly sure what Dennis Hastert has at stake in the Kansas Senate primary, but he waded into it today, endorsing Rep. Todd Tiahrt. (Tiahrt is up against another former Hastert colleague, Rep. Jerry Moran, in a moderate/conservative duel; maybe Hastert sees this as a proxy battle over the GOP’s heart-and-soul.)

• Mayors: In Austin’s mayoral election over the weekend, no candidate finished over 50%, but it looks like there may be no contested runoff after all; 2nd-place finisher Brewster McCracken, who trailed fellow city councilor Lee Leffingwell by 20 points on Saturday, said that he’s bowing out of the runoff and conceding. In San Antonio, former city councilor and rising star Julian Castro easily won against eight other challengers.

SurveyUSA (4/17-19, likely voters):

Jerry Moran (R): 39

Todd Tiahrt (R): 35

(MoE: ±4.8%)

With Kathleen Sebelius about to be confirmed as HHS Secretary, all the action in the Kansas senate race is in the GOP primary. Although it’s been a pretty low-key race so far, it’s definitely a continuation of the ongoing battle for the heart ‘n’ soul of the Kansas GOP, between the “moderate” business wing of the party and the religious conservatives.

Rep. Jerry Moran, playing for Team Main Street, currently holds an insignificant lead over Rep. Todd Tiahrt from Team Megachurch. (Interestingly, although he has the more moderate record, Moran represents much more conservative turf than Tiahrt: the rural KS-01 in the western half of the state, with a new PVI of R+23.) The only previous public poll of the primary (from R2K) had Tiahrt up slightly at 24-19, so at this point, it mostly seems to be a battle of name recognition, as each representative seems to play strongest in his own CD. In the crosstabs, Tiahrt leads 60-23 in the southeast, while Moran leads 62-26 in the west.

SurveyUSA also takes a look at the governor’s race — again, focusing only on the GOP primary, because no one has any idea who the Democratic candidate might be. Retiring senator Sam Brownback seems to have a lock on the race, defeating SoS Jerry Ron Thornburgh (who has also announced his candidacy) 64-17.

• NY-Gov: Andrew Cuomo made statements in a speech at Schenectady County Community College on Tuesday to the effect that his “only plan is to run for re-election as attorney general,” and that he believes David Paterson will be re-elected as governor. I wouldn’t be prone to believe him (and it seems like nobody else does either; only The Hill has taken any notice of this comment), given his poll numbers and the fundraising groundwork he’s laid. It just seems weird; he’s well past the point where he needs to be coy about his plans.

• NY-20: About that recent DNC ad touting Obama’s endorsement of Scott Murphy… while the existence of the ad itself has been gobbling up a good deal of headlines, it appears that it won’t actually be seen by a lot of eyeballs in-district. The DNC’s independent expenditure filing with the FEC indicates that they’re only putting up $10,000 for the ad buy. (J)

• CA-10: Departing Rep. Ellen Tauscher has already endorsed state senator Mark DeSaulnier to take her place. Apparently she had intended to wait until he formally announced his candidacy, but the internal poll from yesterday from assemblywoman Joan Buchanan showing her in the lead may have forced Tauscher’s hand.

• UT-Sen: The knives are still out for Bob Bennett, but it’s looking like someone higher up the totem pole than former Juab County DA David Leavitt may jump into the primary: Attorney General Mark Shurtleff is also “considering” it. Ultra-conservatives sense an opening because of Bennett’s pro-bailout vote, and also because of Utah’s unique nominating system. A candidate who consolidates activist support and breaks 60% at the state convention outright wins, and can avoid the primary altogether.

• KS-Sen: Here’s another example of how Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn likes to keep us guessing. Not only is he wading into the GOP senate primary in his neighboring state, but he’s endorsing Rep. Jerry Moran, who passes for a moderate by Kansas standards, over Rep. Todd Tiahrt, from the religious right corner of the party.

• MI-11: Back to the drawing board? Democratic state Sen. Glenn Anderson, who has been the target of a draft effort to encourage him to take on GOP weirdo Thaddeus McCotter, says that he’ll probably run for re-election instead. (J)

• PA-12: Bill Russell, who held Jack Murtha to 58% in 2008, is back for another try in 2010. No word if he’ll use BMW Direct for his fundraising efforts again.

• NJ-Gov: Another day, another ugly poll for Jon Corzine. This time, it’s this month’s installment of the Quinnipiac poll. Not much change from last month: Chris Christie leads Corzine 46-37, up a bit from 44-38. This despite 61% of voters not knowing enough about Christie to form an opinion of him!

• KY-Sen: Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson may be the guy on the GOP’s wish list for the Kentucky Senate seat, but he said yesterday that he’s running for Senate only if Jim Bunning retires. (What are the odds on that?) Meanwhile, state senate president David Williams is accusing Grayson and Bunning of being in cahoots to shut him out of the race. Good times.

• CT-Sen: You gotta love Joe Lieberman, always there to lend a helping hand. Lieberman announced that he’s supporting Chris Dodd for re-election, even though Dodd supported, y’know, the Democrat in the 2006 general. As Lanny Davis puts it, “Being a mensch and a friend is more important than carrying a grudge.”

• CO-04: Nice to see that someone can get a job in this economy: Marilyn Musgrave has emerged from months of post-defeat seclusion to take a leadership position with something called the Susan B. Anthony List, apparently a bizarro-world EMILY’s List that supports anti-abortion female candidates for office. (No word on whether Anthony plans to sue to get her name back.) It’s unclear whether this is permanent or Musgrave is staying close to donors until a rematch in CO-04.

• KS-01, KS-04: Mike Huckabee (who overwhelmingly won the Kansas caucuses) is wading into the primaries to fill the two safe GOP seats left vacant by the Jerry Moran/Todd Tiahrt scrum for the open senate seat. He’s endorsing state senator Tim Huelskamp in KS-01 and state senator Dick Kelsey in KS-04. RNC member Mike Pompeo is also expected to run in KS-04, while ex-aide to Sam Brownback Rob Wasinger and businessman Tim Barker are already running in KS-01.

• Maps: Here’s a nice resource to bookmark, from Ruy Teixeira and the Center for American Progress: it’s a collection of interactive maps showing state-by-state 04-08 and 88-08 shifts, along with piles of 08 exit poll data.

• MN-Sen: As if you needed one more reason not to donate to Republicans, the Norm Coleman campaign accidentally made public 4.3 GB of donors’ personal data, including credit card numbers and security information.

Research 2000 for Daily Kos (2/2-4, registered voters):

Kathleen Sebelius (D): 47

Todd Tiahrt (R): 37

Kathleen Sebelius (D): 48

Jerry Moran (R): 36

(MoE: ±4%)

Todd Tiahrt (R): 24

Jerry Moran (R): 19

Undecided: 57

(MoE: ±5%)

The race for the open Senate seat in Kansas looks to be Kathleen Sebelius’s for the taking, if she would just show up (and hopefully these numbers will pique her interest). Research 2000 finds that the Kansas governor leads both of her potential candidates by a double-digit margin. If anyone can break the sixty-plus years of Republicans having a lock on the Kansas senate seats, it’s her.

There’s one sort of generalized caveat here, though: Sebelius isn’t over the 50% mark here, and yet she’s extremely well-known (with a 56% favorable/37% unfavorable, almost everyone has an opinion of her), leaving me to wonder where that last few percent to put her over the top in this dark-red state are going to come from. With both Reps. Tiahrt and Moran much less-known (check out the undecided numbers on their primary), they seem to have the room to expand. While you can’t deny that Sebelius is in the driver’s seat here, this looks to be a much closer race in Nov. 2010 than the current gaudy numbers indicate. (Discussion is already well underway in conspiracy‘s diary.)

Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 2/2-4. Likely voters. MoE 4% (No trendlines)

Tiahrt (R) 37

Sebelius (D) 47

Moran (R) 36

Sebelius (D) 48

http://www.dailykos.com/storyo…

Contradicting that earlier GOP primary poll Tiahrt leads Moran 24-19.

“Yet here we have Gov. Kathleen Sebelius coming in with a solid 56-37 approval rating, including a surprisingly good 42-54 among Republicans, which is important given that Republicans make up half the state’s voters. In the head-to-head matchups, Sebelius, gets about a third of those voters. Independents, another quarter of the voter pool, like her at a 63-27 clip. If those numbers held up, she’d make history by having a Democrat represent Kansas in the U.S. Senate for the first time since 1939.”

Run Kathleen, run!

(Cross-posted from Kansas Jackass

Two bits of news out of the Republican Primary for the United States Senate seat Sam Brownback is vacating in 2010.

First, Congressman Todd Tiahrt announced the formation of his campaign steering committee.  It includes such Republican notables as State Representatives Kasha Kelly, Lance Kinzer, and Peggy Mast, along with former Speaker of the Kansas House Doug Mays, and Sharon Meissner, who we surmise is the wife of twice-failed Kansas State Board of Education candidate Dr. Robert Meissner.

Lovely, right?  I do appreciate they sent the press release directly to the blog, though.

In the news that actually matters, the Washington Post is today reporting a poll commissioned for the campaign of Congressman Jerry Moran includes much better news for him than it does good ol’ Todder.

Rep. Jerry Moran starts as the frontrunner for the GOP Senate nod in Kansas, according to new polling done for his campaign. Moran, who has held the massive central-western 1st district since 1996, holds a 41 percent to 25 percent edge over fellow Rep. Todd Tiahrt in a poll conducted by Glen Bolger of Public Opinion Strategies.

“While it is still very early in the primary campaign, it is currently a lot better to be Jerry Moran than it is to be Todd Tiahrt,” Bolger wrote in the polling memo.

I’m sure people will read that and scream, “But it was a internal poll, so it’s just bullshit.”  While I’m sure campaign-released polls always only include selective information (like, for instance, we bet Moran isn’t telling anyone who he matches up against Gov. Kathleen Sebelius…), just because it’s an internal poll doesn’t immediately make it invalid.  A polling firm won’t get much work if their poll are routinely proven wrong in the press.

So, there you go- while Tiahrt’s busy naming his committee, Moran’s busy winning the election.  Long way ’til August 2010, but the pollster is right- I’d much rather be Jerry Moran today.

(Cross posed from Kansas Jackass)

With radical right-winger Todd Tiahrt not running for re-election to the Kansas 4th District seat in Congress in favor of a bid for the United States Senate(probably), we’ve got another open congressional seat on our hands in Kansas.

We already talked about who the Republicans might decide to put up, with Susan Wagle, Matt Schlapp and his Mom Sue, and Derek Schmidt all seeming to be likely candidates.

Now we turn to the Democratic side.

Just like our previous lists for Governor and the United State Senate, these are folks I think could potentially make a respectable run at the office in discussion, and they certainly do vary in likelihood and viability.

State Rep. Raj Goyle shocked the Kansas political establishment when he beat incumbent Republican State Rep. Bonnie Huy in 2006, and has since made a name for himself as an able and ambitious member of the state legislature.  As a testament to the quality of a candidate he is, in his reliably Republican district his original election in 2006 wasn’t that close (56%-44%) and his re-election in 2008 was a blow-out: He won 67% of the vote.

Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer certainly does have the name recognition to run, though we aren’t sure how the non-Wichita parts of the KS-04 would react to him.  State Representative Jim Ward and Board of Regents member and 1996 Senate candidate Jill Docking are also both candidate who could certainly raise the cash and create the organization needed to win.

In my eyes, after Docking, we’ve got quite a jump in the likelihood these folks might consider running.

Former State Senator Don Betts ran in 2008 and got smashed by Tiahrt.  While Betts certainly might do better when the seat is open, I’m afraid his political future has been dashed in some pretty cold water.  State Rep. Melody McCray-Miller is a long shot, but, again, could put together the campaign needed to win a seat.

Here’s two way, way, way wild cards:  Former Congressman Dan Glickman and Vice Chairwoman of the Kansas Democratic Party Teresa Krusor.  Both these politicos could certainly raise oodles of cash through connections in Kansas and nationwide.  Also, we know Glickman can run and win in the area- he did represent Wichita for a hundred thousand years in Congress before Tiahrt swept in in the ’90’s.

These are just initial thoughts, again, it’s a long way to 2010, but I think each of these people could run against anyone and win.

And, by-the-by, our money’s on Goyle.

The first House open seat of the 2010 election:

With the 2008 election season over, Rep. Jerry Moran wasted little time taking the next step in his likely bid for higher office.

The western Kansas Republican filed paperwork Friday that allows him to accept contributions for a U.S. Senate campaign.

Moran, of Hays, has been telling constituents for months that he plans to seek the seat being vacated in 2010 by Republican Sam Brownback. His statement of candidacy filed with the Federal Election Commission and the secretary of the U.S. Senate formalizes that process.

“Jerry was on the ballot for the U.S. House for the last time,” Moran spokesman Travis Murphy said Friday. “He’s made his intentions known for some time that this was his plan.”

Don’t get your hopes up. This seat had a PVI of R+20. We don’t yet know how Obama did here, but it can’t have been great. Perhaps of greater interest to open-seat fans is this tidbit:

Moran may not be the only prominent Republican laying the groundwork for a Senate bid. Rep. Todd Tiahrt, of the Wichita area, has not ruled out such a campaign and has been traveling the state recently to raise his profile outside his south-central Kansas district.

“An open Senate seat will draw a lot of interest, and my feeling is Kansas will not have two senators from the same congressional district,” Tiahrt said Friday, a reference to Republican Sen. Pat Roberts, who also represented western Kansas before ascending to the Senate. “I can guarantee there will be others who will get into this race.”

Tiahrt swamped what had looked like a promising challenge from state Sen. Donald Betts by a punishing 64-32 margin. I wouldn’t expect this R+12 district to be much more promising as an open seat, but you never know. At the very least, another Pearce vs. Wilson-style GOP senate primary would be fun.