Tag: NV-Sen

• FL-Sen: As much as Charlie Crist seems to have benefited from his switch to an independent bid, he still has to deal with blowback from a lot of ticked-off Republicans. A group of GOPers, led by state Rep. Tom Grady, has filed a class action lawsuit against Crist to get back their contributions which they thought would be used to support a Republican. Meanwhile, with Crist running around looking gubernatorial amidst the oil spill crisis, and the media having lost interest with the Republican primary settled, Marco Rubio now finds himself in an unusual position (which may be reflected in recent polls): the guy who isn’t getting any attention.

• IL-Sen: Well, it took Mark Kirk a couple months to do what Richard Blumenthal took a few days to do, but he finally got around to apologizing today in a press conference for his various “careless” embellishments of his military and teaching records.

• KS-Sen: SurveyUSA (6/24-27, likely voters, 5/21-23 in parens):

Jerry Moran (R): 53 (52)

Todd Tiahrt (R): 33 (29)

Other: 5 (4)

Undecided: 9 (15)

(MoE: ±3.7%)

SurveyUSA also looks at the Democratic Senate primary (where little-known college professor Lisa Johnston is the surprise leader, at 24, followed by somewhat higher-profile candidates like former newspaper editor Charles Schollenberger at 16 and state Sen. David Haley at 11), and at the Republican gubernatorial primary (where I didn’t even know there was a contest anymore, but where Sam Brownback leads Joan Heffington 76-17).

• KY-Sen: With the primary resolved and with Rand Paul having gone into media-related hiding, his fundraising seems to have dwindled accordingly. He held another online moneybomb yesterday, which used to be his bread and butter, but the bomb was more of a dud this time: he banked only $90K by yesterday evening. That’s was off from the $400K generated by his largest one last August.

• NJ-Sen: A couple items of good news for Frank Lautenberg: first, he’s announced that, after having been treated for lymphoma, his cancer is now in remission. And today, he got Robert Byrd‘s gavel for the Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security.

• NV-Sen: Sharron Angle, in contrast to Rand Paul, is at least temporarily breaking her media silence tonight… and she’s doing it not exactly the friendliest environment either, going on local reporter Jon Ralston’s TV show. (Ralston is one of the best left of the dying breed of state-level political reporters; his Twitter feed is highly recommended.) Meanwhile, Nevada Dems are hitting Angle for her decidedly extreme position on abortion (legal under absolutely no circumstances), while the once-thought-ominous Karl Rove 527 American Crossroads is out with a new ad attacking Harry Reid over unemployment.

• WV-Sen: There’s quite a long list of potential temporary appointees developing in West Virginia, but ex-Gov. (and current College Board president) Gaston Caperton won’t be one of them; he took his name out of the running. In addion to former state party chair Nick Casey and current chair Larry Puccio, other names, all of whom are well-connected with Gov. Joe Manchin, bubbling up today include former Manchin counsel Carte Goodwin, businessman Perry Petropolis, former state Supreme Court justice Richard Neely, and first lady Gayle Manchin.

• AL-Gov: Robert Bentley is touting an internal poll from Dresner Wicker & Associates giving him a substantial lead over Bradley Byrne in the GOP runoff; Bentley leads 46-27, and has 59/9 favorables. Bentley has also pledged no negative ads from his camp, which may be a relief to many Alabamians (and which may have been the secret to Bentley’s surprise success in the primary, as he dodged the heavy crossfire between Byrne and Tim James).

• CA-Gov: There’s a clear difference in strategy in California’s governor’s race, with Jerry Brown (who needs to draw Meg Whitman out into the open) agreeing to ten debates and Whitman (who needs to hide behind her ads) agreeing to one. New ads run by Brown surrogates seem to be taking increasing aim at Whitman’s tendency to hide behind her large piles of money, too.

• RI-Gov, RI-01, RI-02: The Rhode Island Democratic party issued its endorsements yesterday, and the results weren’t good for the party’s former state chair (or his brother). Bill Lynch lost the RI-01 endorsement to Providence mayor David Cicilline, while AG Patrick Lynch lost the RI-Gov endorsement to state Treasurer Frank Caprio. In the 2nd, incumbent Jim Langevin got the endorsement over primary challenger state Rep. Betsy Dennigan.

• TX-Gov: The situation with the Texas Greens ballot line isn’t quite going away yet. A lower court decided last week to block them from the ballot because their petition drive was illegally funded with an in-kind corporate contribution (with roots tracing back to Rick Perry’s former chief of staff). The decision, however, was just appealed to the Texas Supreme Court (which, of course, is Republican-controlled and not averse to the occasionally nakedly political decision).

• ID-01: Here, maybe, is another instance of the Chamber of Commerce realizing that conservative Democrats do a better job of addressing big business’s needs for a functioning physical and educational infrastructure than do the group of anarchists who seem to have seized control of the GOP? The US Chamber of Commerce just gave freshman Dem Walt Minnick their endorsement.

• LA-02: Rep. Joe Cao has had to back down on a fundraising letter that strongly implies that the local Catholic diocese and Archbishop Gregory Aymond backed his candidacy. Cao apologized for taking Aymond’s praise for him out of context.

• MI-03: Well, at least we now know who to cheer against in the GOP primary to replace retiring Rep. Vern Ehlers. The Club for Growth announced yesterday that they’re backing state Rep. Justin Amash, meaning that Amash must have impressed the far-right group with his level of disdain for public spending. (JL)

• PA-07: Philly’s just a short Amtrak ride from Washington DC, and Joe Biden will be there July 19 to host a combined fundraiser for the DCCC and for the Dem candidate in the 7th, state Rep. Bryan Lentz.

• TX-17: Here’s an article that’s an interesting reminder of how all politics is, in the end, local, and how it can turn on stuff that’s a million miles away from inside-the-Beltway concerns. Politico looks at the race in the 17th, which is very much a Waco/Baylor (Chet Edwards) vs. College Station/Texas A&M (Bill Flores) contest, with the recent (now irrelevant, though) proposal to break apart the Big 12 a key flashpoint.

• WV-01: Old man yells at cloud? Initially, the idea of a legendary West Virginia Democratic politician setting up a PAC with the pure intent of stopping Democratic nominee Mike Oliverio from winning in November sounds like a game-changing impediment. From the backstory, though, it sounds like former SoS Ken Hechler may not have that much oomph behind his vendetta, which seems mostly motivated by Oliverio’s 2004 failed primary challenge to him in the SoS primary, where Oliverio’s entire argument seemed predicated on the fact that Hechler was 89. (If you do the math, that makes him 95 now. I guess the secret to longevity is to become a Democrat in West Virginia!)

• CA-Init: Don’t count on California making the switch to the Washington-style top-two primary just yet, despite the passage of Proposition 14 earlier this month. The major and minor parties are weighing legal challenges to it, and they’re watching with interest the latest round of litigation on the matter in Washington. (The US Supreme Court has already upheld a state’s authority to switch to a top-two primary, but there’s a new suit pending on new grounds.)

NV-Sen: An interesting tidbit from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which Jon Ralston rightly knocks them for burying: Former Rep. Barbara Vucanovich, the first and only Republican woman to hold federal office in Nevada, says she isn’t sure whether she can support Sharron Angle, and might just vote “none of the above.”

WI-Sen: Former GOP candidate Terrence Wall is claiming that teabagging richie rich Ron Johnson engaged in “bribery” to win the state Republican convention in May – where “bribery” is characterized as, apparently, paying for some delegate hotel rooms. Johnson denies the allegations, and even his remaining opponent, Dave Westlake, isn’t buying them either.

WV-Sen: Sen. Robert Byrd, age 92, was admitted to the hospital over the weekend and is said to be “seriously ill” by his staff. We of course extend our wishes for his recovery.

AZ-Gov: While she has some distance to go before she reaches Sharron Angle or Rand Paul levels of foot-in-mouth disease, I think Jan Brewer is going to be one of those Republicans who really helps us by not knowing how to shut up. Case in point: She said on CNN this weekend that “the majority of the people that are coming to Arizona and trespassing are now becoming drug mules.”

CT-Gov: Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Foley is busy explaining two arrests in his past, both involving vehicular incidents. (Click the link for full details.) No charges were filed in either incident.

FL-Gov: Florida Republicans are drafting a new immigration law for their own state modeled after Arizona’s. We’re slotting this under the FL-Gov header because AG Bill McCollum’s office is helping to write this new bill. (Florida has one of the largest Hispanic populations in the country, with 21% of the state claiming Hispanic origin.) Meanwhile, the St. Pete Times takes a lengthy look at Rick Scott’s tenure at Columbia/HCA, the healthcare giant which engaged in massive fraud and eventually paid a record-setting $1.7 billion fine. Scott is trying to tout his experience as a CEO, but of course keeps attempting to distance himself from his former company. Ah, but what’s a little two-faced bullshit on the campaign trail?

IA-Gov: Ah, the Republican Party never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. As desmoines dem chronicles at her blog, Bleeding Heartland (bookmark it), Terry Branstad was dealt a pretty ugly vote-of-not-a-lot-of-confidence at the GOP state convention this past Saturday. Even though Branstad nominated his own Lt. Gov. candidate (the largely unknown Kim Reynolds), a state rep. put Bob Vander Plaats’ name into the hopper for the nod – and Branstad’s pick squeaked by with just 56% of the delegate vote. (Vander Plaats, of course, ran against Branstad for the gubernatorial nomination, losing by only about 10 points despite huge disparities in name rec and money.) And just the day before, BVP said he still wasn’t planning to support Brandsad, nor would he rule out an independent bid. Smell the cat fud, baby!

AR-02: I’m not really getting Joyce Elliott’s messaging here. On the one hand, she’s trying to tie former AG Tim Griffin to his one-time mentor, Karl Rove. On the other hand, she says she won’t run a campaign against Washington, DC. So not only is her message muddled, but she’s also unilaterally disarming. I hope she sees the error of her ways on this one.

MA-10: State Rep. Jeffrey Perry is touting an internal poll from Public Opinion Strategies showing him with a 41-25 lead in the GOP primary over ex-state Treasurer Joe Malone. Perry also claims to have favorables of 44% and unfavorables of just 1%….

VA-02: Sarah Palin is going to be in town for a wingnut event called the “Freedom Fest.” But GOP nominee Scott Rigell won’t attend – and his campaign is offering some made-up sounding b.s. about FEC regulations preventing him from going. Unsurprisingly, teabagger Kenny Golden is hitting Rigell for his failure to appear. Ironically, Rigell is claiming the fact that Golden wasn’t offered equal time at the event is a reason he (Rigell) isn’t going!

• AZ-Sen: Wow, ultimate blowhard J.D. Hayworth actually realized he was in an untenable situation and had to apologize… for his having appeared in an infomercial touting “free grant money” seminar ripoffs. (He was unapologetic on Monday when the story broke, saying Republicans’ two favorite words: “buyer beware.”)

• CO-Sen: The Denver Post has a must-read profile of Ken Buck’s time as a federal prosecutor in Colorado, focusing on a 2000 case where he declined to file charges against gun shop owners, suspected of illegal sales, that he knew from local Republican circles. The incident ended with Buck resigning in 2002 to take a job as counsel for a construction company, after receiving a letter of reprimand and having to take ethics courses. (Ironically, the US Attorney who issued the letter of reprimand is Republican now-AG John Suthers, who probably would have been the GOP’s strongest Senate candidate here had he decided to run.)

• CT-Sen: Linda McMahon is accusing Rob Simmons of running a “stealth campaign,” despite his having “suspended” his operations. Simmons’ name remains on the ballot, and he still has a skeletal staff, although apparently for fundraising purposes and to help other local candidates… but it seems pretty clear he’s keeping his engine idling in the event that the McMahon campaign implodes, which is probably the source of her chagrin. McMahon is also out with a new ad, which, for the first time, features her admitting to her past as pro wrestling impresario (instead of just vagueness about being a “businesswoman”); she says that pro wrestling “isn’t real” but “our problems are.” Yeah, tell Owen Hart it isn’t real…

• KS-Sen: Sarah Palin sez: Get a brain, Moran! Well, she didn’t quite say that, but she did tell her Facebook legion to support Todd Tiahrt in the GOP Senate primary in Kansas instead of Jerry Moran. Social con Tiahrt trails fiscal hawk Moran in the polls, though.

• NV-Sen: There’s more amazing dirt today on the Independent American Party, the right-wing third party in Nevada that included Sharron Angle as a member back in the 1990s. The party, during that time period, paid for a bizarre anti-gay flier (referencing “sodomites” and “brazen perverts”) to be included in local newspapers. The party’s other pronouncements during this time included prohibiting “the financing of the New World Order with American taxes” and eliminating “the debt money system.”

• TX-Sen (pdf): PPP has approval numbers for Kay Bailey Hutchison as part of their Texas sample this week, and they might give her some pause about running for re-election in 2012 (which she’s on the fence about, apparently). Her futile run for Governor seems to have hurt her standing, as her overall approval is 37/43 and it’s only 47/37 among Republicans. On the question of whether she should run again, Republicans are split 43/43, and maybe most alarmingly for her, 39% of Republicans think she’s too liberal while 46% say she’s about right. It definitely creates an opening for a teabagger challenge, if she does run again.

• CA-Gov: Meg Whitman’s trying an interesting damage control approach, having taken harder hits from the California Nurses’ Association than anyone else. She’s doing a targeted direct mailing to nurses’ homes, offering her side of the story, saying “don’t take the union boss’s word for it.”

• FL-Gov: I didn’t think super-rich Rick Scott really needed any intervention from outside groups, as he’s able to pay his own way. But he’s getting $1.5 million worth of advertising bought on his behalf by a 527 called “Let’s Get to Work.” It’s yet another anti-Bill McCollum ad, questioning his work as a lobbyist as well as his immigration stance.

• IA-Gov: Terry Branstad, who picked little-known state Sen. Kim Reynolds as a running mate yesterday, is now trying to sell her to the state’s social conservatives, letting them know that she’s really one of them (even if they hadn’t heard of her). Branstad, of course, is trying to head off an indie bid by vanquished primary foe Bob Vander Plaats. There are two other Branstad-related articles you might check out today: one is a piece from the Univ. of Minnesota’s Smart Politics on the success rates for ex-Governor comebacks (bottom line: it’s a pretty high rate (63%), although that’s usually for open seats, not against incumbents). And the other is a Politico look at the possible resurgence of the mustache in politics: Branstad, along with John Hoeven and John Kitzhaber, is wearing the ‘stache with pride (unfortunately, we can’t say the same about Ron Sparks anymore).

• IL-Gov: While nobody seems interested in challenging Scott Lee Cohen’s 133K signatures (five times as many as needed), Democrats are still weighing other legal methods of dispatching Cohen. While Cohen’s situation is unusual and there aren’t court cases on point, it’s possible the state’s sore loser law would prevent him from winning a Dem nomination, resigning it, and subsequently launching his own indie bid for a different office.

• SC-Gov: Here’s what initially seems like a big surprise, but is symptomatic of the rocky relations between the country-club wing of the state GOP and the Mark Sanford wing (of which Nikki Haley is a member). The state’s Chamber of Commerce just endorsed Democratic nominee Vincent Sheheen, suggesting that the GOP’s old-boy network in SC may take desperate measures to keep Haley out. The animus, at least on the surface, seems driven by efforts by Sanford (and Haley, in the legislature) to reject federal stimulus funds. Nice to see something of a public admission that, at the end of the day, big-business Republicans like to see government spending on the infrastructure that they, y’know, need in order to successfully do business, as opposed to the teabaggers’ empty-headed anti-government nihilism.

• TX-Gov: A Texas judge yesterday blocked the Green Party from the ballot in November, which ought to help Dems’ chances if the gubernatorial race winds up close. Moreover, the investigation into who was behind efforts to get the Greens onto the ballot in Texas (and conceivably save Rick Perry) has turned up some remarkable evidence: that Perry’s former chief of staff, Mike Toomey, personally paid for efforts. Toomey paid a monthly stipend for six months to the organizer of the petition drive. (That drive failed, but a subsequent one bankrolled by mysterious group Take Initiative America later succeeded; Democrats, however, blocked the Greens from qualifying, saying that Take Inititative’s $500K operation was an illegal in-kind contribution to the Greens.)

• KS-01, KS-04: SurveyUSA has polls of the Republican primaries in two dark-red districts in Kansas. In the 1st, state Sen. Jim Barnett (probably the most moderate figure in the race) is still in the lead, at 23. Someone by the name of Tracey Mann has surged into 2nd place at 20, from 4 in the last poll of this race in February (probably by virtue of consolidating the Tea Party vote), while CfG choice state Sen. Tim Huelskamp is at 18. Rob Wasinger is at 11, Sue Boldra is at 8, and Marck Cobb is at 2. And in the 4th, it’s a dead heat between two businessmen: Mike Pompeo is at 39 while Wink Hartman is at 37. (Pompeo is the insider here; he’s an RNC committeeman.) State Sen. Jean Schodorf is at 8, with Jim Anderson at 6 and Paji Rutschman at 1. They also look at the Dem primary, where Raj Goyle, despite his fundraising prowess, is only at 42-32 against “retiree” Robert Tillman. Looks like Goyle might need to expend some shoe leather to avoid going the route of Vic Rawl.

• PA-11: Rep. Paul Kanjorski is some Beltway-media hot water, after delivering a very convoluted sentence at a financial reform bill hearing on the topic of foreclosure prevention that made it sound like that “minorities” weren’t “average, good American people.” Extended parsing of the sentence seems to suggest that he was actually taking issue with Republican characterizations of the types of people who wind up in foreclosure. Still, any time that the crusty Kanjorski, facing another tough challenge from Lou Barletta this year, has to spend digging out of his own holes is too much.

• TN-08: With the hard-right rabble whipped up into such a froth that anything short of punching Democrats in the nose is seen as RINO collaborationism, this can’t bode well for Stephen Fincher’s primary hopes. Fincher voted in the May 2010 Democratic primary for local races. Fincher offers the excuse that, with no GOP primary, it was vote in the Dem primary or not vote at all, but that undercuts his own attacks on Ron Kirkland for his occasional Dem-voting past. (wtndem has more in his diary.)

• 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.

AR-Sen: John Boozman says that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will be coming to Little Rock to stump for him next month.

CO-Sen: Ex-Lt. Gov. Jane Norton is attempting to rebut some ugly public polling with an internal of her own from Public Opinion Strategies. Norton’s survey has her up 39-33 in the GOP primary against Weld County DA Ken Buck, but a SurveyUSA poll taken last week showed her getting killed, 53-37.

FL-Sen: Rep. Kendrick Meek and zillionaire asshole Jeff Greene had a seriously feisty debate the other night. I cannot do it justice by summarizing, so I encourage you read the Palm Beach Post’s account. Also of note, Greene is taking a page from the John Kasich playbook and refusing to make his tax returns public. In a display of leadership, he said disclosure was his wife’s call – who said “hell no” when asked by reporters if she would do so.

LA-Sen: As Crisitunity noted, Rep. Charlie Melancon has a real crisitunity to deal with vis-a-vis the gulf oil spill, and it’s been interesting watching the issue play out on the campaign trail. Melancon may have gotten a gift with a federal district court judge’s ruling against the offshore drilling moratorium (something Melancon opposes), but contrary to his wishes, the Obama administration will indeed appeal.

NV-Sen: Jon Ralston, one of Nevada’s top political analysts, points out that Sharron Angle has been touting an endorsement on her website from a bunch of lunatics called the “Declaration Alliance.” They’re a birther outfit, and Ralston has been trying to get Angle on the record as to whether she shares their views – but, says Ralston, “She no longer answers her voicemail, and her press secretary’s voicemail is full.” I’m sure Ralston’ll ask her all about this next week, when he interviews her on his TV show. Here are a couple of other things he ought to bring up: Angle’s statements that unemployed folks have been “spoiled” by government “entitlement” – and that bringing jobs to Nevada wouldn’t be, well, her job as senator. This should be a fun interview!

OH-Gov: As Dave Catanese says, on the campaign trail, “a candidate’s humble upbringing is almost always safe from attack.” So you really have to wonder why in the fuck John Kasich thought it would be a good idea to mock Ted Strickland’s background, braying about his opponent: “Having grown up in a chicken shack on Duck Run, he has all but ignored our cities’ economies and their workers.” Not that you needed it, but even more evidence that Kasich is a grade-A schmuck with a tin ear: He told Alan Colmes he would not be “singing in any chorus for LeBron James” to help keep the NBA uber-star Ohio’ #1 Citizen in Cleveland. Christ, what an asshole!

NV-Gov: Anjeanette Damon of the Las Vegas Sun says that Rory Reid may be going up on the air with TV ads as soon as today – but that’s it. No further details on the nature of the ad, where it might run, or, of course, the size of the buy.

AR-01: Tim Wooldridge is doing everything in his power to convince 1st CD Democrats that they were right to select Chad Causey as their nominee instead of him. He’s still refusing to endorse Causey, and in an interview with Politico, he had kind words for Rick Crawford, the GOP nominee, calling him a “fine fella.” With Dems like these….

FL-06: Will Joe Barton be the next Joe Wilson? Or will he become… well, I just can’t think of a single Republican in recent memory who has been exorcised by the party for saying something outrageous. Which suggests to me that, in fact, GOP rank-and-file are probably cheering Barton for having the “guts” to say the quiet part loud. Indeed, Dave Weigel points to several Republicans who have been aping Barton’s “shakedown” language.) Anyhow, Barton’s doing a fundraiser for Cliff Stearns next week, so it’ll be interesting to see what kind of draw Smokey Joe will be. Stearns doesn’t face any meaningful opposition in this 56% McCain district and has $2.5 million on hand, so I wonder why Barton is doing him the favor in the first place.

KY-03: Todd Lally, the GOP nominee in the 3rd CD, said that fellow Kentuckian Mitch McConnell told him to go twist when he asked for fundraising help. But not to worry – Rand Paul to the rescue! The libertarian freakazoid will apparently do two events with Lally this summer, something I’m sure will play well back in Louisville.

MI-03: Retiring Rep. Vern Ehlers endorsed businessman and former Kent County Commissioner Steve Heacock to succeed him, but pledged to support whomever wins the August 3rd GOP primary. Also in the race are state Sen. Bill Hardiman, state Rep. Justin Amash, attorney Louise Johnson, and Air Force vet Bob Overbeek. Amash recently dinged Heacock for copying and pasting position statements from other Republicans (like Paul Ryan and fellow Michigander Dave Camp) and posting them on his website without attribution. (Heacock has since taken them down.)

MI-07: After a local Republican club announced that Rudy Giuliani would be doing a fundraiser for ex-Rep. Tim Walberg, Brian Rooney (Walberg’s primary opponent) pounced, citing Giuliani’s squishiness on abortion. Rooney’s camp must have been pleased to make the hit, since Walberg had previously zinged Rooney for failing to show up at an anti-abortion group event a few months ago. In any case, Walberg is now saying no, no, no – there was never going to be a Rudy fundraiser in the first place (though his campaign manager said they’d like to do something in the future).

MO-07: Missouri Right to Life endorsed self-funding businessman Billy Long, citing unhappiness with the voting record of state Sens. Gary Nodler and Jack Goodman, the other two major candidates in the race to succeed Roy Blunt. This is a 63% McCain district, though, and we have no real candidate, so any cat fud here is for entertainment purposes only.

WATN: Former Rep. Don Cazayoux was unanimously confirmed as the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Louisiana by the Senate yesterday. Here’s wishing Cazayoux – who is only 46 – a successful tenure and, hopefully, a return to electoral politics some day.

• CA-Sen: Business Week is out with an interesting list of all the Silicon Valley CEOs who are backing Barbara Boxer… or maybe more to the point, the ones who aren’t backing Carly Fiorina, being in the best possible position to evaluate her legacy of fail at HP. Pro-Boxer names include Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and even Cisco’s John Chambers.

• FL-Sen: Well, if nothing else, maybe this’ll help Marco Rubio’s teabaggin’ average-guy cred: like so many other Americans, he’s facing foreclosure on his home. Well, make that “one of” his homes, so maybe that’s not so average. Court documents show he’s facing a foreclosure suit on a house he co-owns in Tallahassee along with FL-25 candidate David Rivera. Rubio contends that he and Rivera just paid off the $9K delinquency yesterday (after Politico started asking questions).

• NV-Sen: So here’s why the GOP is keeping Sharron Angle under wraps while giving her the Eliza Doolittle treatment behind the scenes: an impromptu interview with a KLAS TV reporter turned into Angle getting tied into knots over Social Security “transitioning out” and then cutting the interview short when getting asked about UN withdrawal. It was followed up by a denunciation from a nameless campaign spokesperson who called the reporter “an idiot” and “another term that can’t be repeated.” Meanwhile, the whole massage/sauna thing keeps being an issue, with Angle now saying that the wacky rehabilitation program that she backed has nothing to do with Scientology… it’s a natural homeopathic method that just happens to have been developed by L. Ron Hubbard.

• WA-Sen: Here’s some more momentum for Clint Didier’s tea-flavored campaign: Sarah Palin is doubling down on her backing. He’ll be getting at least two appearances with her, who previously endorsed him before Dino Rossi’s entry into the race. He also got some sort-of good news from the NRSC, saying that they promised (having gotten burned on the Crist/Rubio and Norton/Buck fronts) that they wouldn’t take any sides until there was actually a nominee. (He also took a few whacks at the EPA in the interview, fed up with their “unburdensome regulations.”)

• MD-Gov: I’m not sure what Brian Murphy, the random right-wing businessman who’s running in the GOP primary against Bob Ehrlich, had in mind when he released this internal poll, taken for him by a polling company called Polling Company; it shows him trailing Dem incumbent Martin O’Malley 44-25. The more interesting number is that Ehrlich trails O’Malley by only 1, 44-43. Perhaps the most salient number (the Ehrlich/Murphy matchup) doesn’t even get mentioned. Gee, I wonder why?

• OK-Gov: The newest Sooner poll has Republican Rep. Mary Fallin looking large and in charge in the open-seat gubernatorial race. Fallin leads state Sen. Randy Brogdon 59-10 in the GOP primary, and leads both Democrats by double-digits: 50-35 against AG Drew Edmondson and 49-36 against LG Jari Askins. The Dem primary is super-close, with Edmondson leading Askins only 37-36. Want to see a Dem win this race? Make sure Brodgon somehow wins the GOP primary. Edmondson leads Brogdon 41-40, while Askins leads 44-36.

• AL-07: Terri Sewell is out with an internal poll (from Anzalone Liszt) giving her a lead coming out of the primary and heading into the runoff against Shelia Smoot. Sewell, who’s the only candidate who’s done much advertising, now claims a 53-33 lead over Smoot (after winning the primary with an 8-pt. margin). The difference maker is that Smoot Sewell is winning the majority (48-38) of backers of third-place finisher Earl Hilliard Jr. (Hilliard has said he won’t be endorsing either one in the runoff.)

• FL-08: I’m not even sure where to begin with this weird story, but apparently Bruce O’Donoghue, one of the various Republicans in the primary in the 8th, is accusing the Florida Tea Party of being in cahoots with Rep. Alan Grayson, to run Peg Dunmire on their line and split the conservative vote. He’s pointing out connections between Grayson and local talk radio host and local Tea Party co-founder Doug Guetzloe, but both Grayson and Guetzloe say those connections aren’t meaningful. Recall that the loudly liberal Grayson actually did appear at a teabaggers’ rally last summer, but that seemed to mostly be about their common cause over the issue of auditing the Fed.

• NC-02: Here’s a sign that maybe we don’t need to take the Renee Ellmers campaign that seriously, at least not yet: her consultant, Carter Wrenn, is stepping on the NRCC’s message management after having gotten gifted a video of Bobby Etheridge’s freak-out with trackers. Despite the NRCC’s protestations that they have no idea who these innocent “college students” are, Wrenn says that his own conversations with the NRCC indicate that they know who they are.

• TX-23: Another slightly stale GOP internal poll (this one by OnMessage, taken in mid-May) shows, big surprise, a competitive race in the 23rd. Incumbent Dem Ciro Rodriguez leads self-funding GOPer Quico Canseco 48-45. Given that internal polls tend to get released only when they show a candidate’s best-case scenario, this may actually make me feel a little more confident about Rodriguez, whom we always knew was in for a rough ride this cycle. (H/t GOPVOTER.)

• VA-05: Huh, here’s a rapid about-face from GOP nominee Robert Hurt. Last Saturday, he said he’d “absolutely” be willing to participate in three-way debates with not just Tom Perriello but also tea-flavored independent Jeffrey Clark. Perhaps Clark was wondering why Perriello seemed very pleased with that (or maybe somebody smarter about this stuff from the NRCC gave him a call and pointed out that Clark’s votes are coming only out Hurt’s column), but now he’s reversed course and says he “cannot allow the important debate in this election to be sidetracked by a candidate who is not serious about his campaign.”

• WV-03: Here’s one other sketchy poll: an internal poll from the camp of Spike Maynard, the GOPer in the race, taken by somebody called Mark Blankenship Enterprises. (Steve Singiser wonders if there’s any familial connection to Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, the travel buddy of Maynard, but this article seems to think not.) At any rate, long-time Rep. Nick Rahall leads Maynard 42-36.

• Facebook: Thanks for helping us smash through the completely arbitrary yet very important barrier of 500 fans! Keep the “likes” coming!

• FL-Sen: Politico has a new FL-Sen piece provocatively titled “Democrats flirt with backing Charlie Crist,” but it points to some definitely solidifying conventional wisdom: that Crist, who has been steadily moving to the left in his independent bid, is becoming more appealing to local Dem power brokers as something of a de facto Dem candidate. This is especially the case if Jeff Greene, who has no base and a truckload of vulnerabilities, somehow spends his way into snatching the Dem nomination from Kendrick Meek. Along those lines, Crist‘s latest repositioning is on the issue of travel to Cuba, where he’d previously backed restrictions on travel and remittances but is now moving more in line with freer Democratic positions.

• NC-Sen: Elaine Marshall got an endorsement from MoveOn with less than a week to go until the Senate runoff against Cal Cunningham. It’s kind of late in the game, but MoveOn money may fund some last-minute ground-pounding.

• NV-Sen: Why do I have the feeling that Sharron Angle is going to get her own bullet every morning filled with the latest crazy revelations about her? I don’t even know where to begin: hot on the heels of revelations that she used to be a member of the right-wing Independent American Party in the 1990s (which she left because of political expedience to run for state Assembly) comes today’s revelations that in the 1980s she left the Republican Party at the height of the Reagan era to become a… Democrat? (She says she did so to help a conservative Dem with his state Senate campaign.) Well, now she can claim she’s tripartisan. Also from yesterday were, of course, revelations that in January of this year she floated the possibility of armed insurrection if Congress “keeps going the way it is.”

With the NRSC playing whack-a-mole with daily Angle bombshells, John Cornyn says he’ll be rolling her out verrrrrrry slowly… it’ll be “a few weeks” before she’s ready to take questions from the press. This comes on top of several stories about Cornyn’s more centrist colleagues cautiously distancing themselves from Angle, with Scott Brown and Olympia Snowe saying they aren’t getting involved, and Dick Lugar taking exception to most of her key action items. At least Jim DeMint is coming to her rescue, paying for some IEs on her behalf out of his PAC money.

• MI-Gov (pdf): Magellan’s out with another public poll of a Republican primary, this time in Michigan. They find Peter Hoekstra narrowly in the lead at 26, with Rick Snyder at 20, Mike Cox at 16, Mike Bouchard at 11, and Tom George at 2. Meanwhile, Cox seems to at least be winning the endorsement game; he got two more nods today, both from two of Hoekstra’s slightly more moderate House colleagues: Dave Camp and Thad McCotter. (Candice Miller, on the other hand, backed Hoekstra last week.)

• OR-Gov: Here’s quick about-face from John DiLorenzo, a Portland attorney who’d fronted himself six figures to launch an independent gubernatorial candidacy. Today he decided not to run after all; he had an interesting explanation, in that he felt that both Dem John Kitzhaber and GOPer Chris Dudley were moderate enough that there really wasn’t any room for him to carve out some space in the middle.

• NC-11: GOP nominee Jeff Miller is out with an internal poll from POS conducted several weeks ago that show him in somewhat competitive territory against Democratic Rep. Heath Shuler. The poll gives Shuler a 46-34 edge over Miller. Miller is on the wrong end of 10:1 cash advantage for Shuler, but just got a FreedomWorks endorsement which may help him gain some ground.

• NJ-06: It looks like the GOP primary in the 6th, the last race from Super Duper Tuesday not to be called, is finally over. Diane Gooch, the pre-primary favorite, at least based on her NRCC backing, conceded and said she won’t seek a recount. Anna Little finished 84 votes ahead of Gooch, who endorsed Little for the run against long-time Dem Rep. Frank Pallone.

• NY-24: Here’s one more big problem for endangered Rep. Mike Arcuri: GOP opponent Richard Hanna got the endorsement of the statewide Independence Party. There’s one catch, though; the Cayuga County Independence Party isn’t on board, and say they’d prefer to endorse Arcuri (and take great issue with the selection process, or lack thereof). It’s unclear for now how the state and county parties will resolve the dispute. Hanna got the 2008 IP line, which probably helped him keep things surprisingly close that year.

• OH-12: GOP Rep. Pat Tiberi was yesterday declared one of only nine GOPers who need continued financial support, largely because he’s facing a top-tier challenge from Franklin Co. Commissioner Paula Brooks. Brooks got a big fundraising boost today with an endorsement from EMILY’s List, which should help send some money in the direction of one of the few places where Dems are playing offense.

• TN-04: One more internal poll to report on, although it’s incredibly stale (from late March… however it was just brought to our attention, thanks to a tipster in the comments). A poll by Republican pollster OnMessage finds Rep. Lincoln Davis — a Dem in a terrible district but facing small-fry opposition — leads his two possible opponents, Scott DesJarlais and Jack Bailey, by identical 44-33 margins.

• UT-02: It sounds like the GOP is still maintaining hopes of monkeying around with the Dem primary in the 2nd, as there are subtle rumblings of efforts to get teabaggers to cross over and vote for very liberal (and probably unelectable in the general) Claudia Wright instead of Rep. Jim Matheson in the Dem primary. Somehow that doesn’t seem likely, though, considering that those same voters would probably like to have a say in the hard-fought and likely close Republican Senate primary between Mike Lee and Tim Bridgewater on the same day (June 22).

• WI-08: The crowd in the GOP field in the 8th is a little smaller; retired physician Marc Trager dropped out of the race, citing health reasons. He gave his backing to state Rep. Roger Roth, who still faces ex-state Rep. Terri McCormick, contractor Reid Ribble, and county supervisors Marc Savard and Andy Williams.

• VA-St. House: The GOP held seats in the state House of Delegates in two special elections last night, meaning they still control that chamber 59-39 (with 2 GOP-leaning indies). Both were in fairly red territory, but the Dems had felt they had a potentially strong candidate in HD-15 in Harrisonburg mayor Kai Degner. Degner lost to Tony Wilt, 66-34. In Chesterfield County in Richmond’s suburbs, Roxanne Robinson beat William Brown with 72%.

(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.

• CT-Sen, CT-Gov: Leftover from last Friday is the most recent Quinnipiac poll of Connecticut. Without much changing from their previous poll other than some within-the-margin-of-error gains for Linda McMahon, the poll is very digestible. Richard Blumenthal leads McMahon 55-35 (instead of 56-31 in late May), leads Rob Simmons (who has “suspended” his campaign) 54-33, and leads Peter Schiff 56-29. McMahon leads Simmons and Schiff in the GOP primary 45-29-13. They also included gubernatorial primaries (but not the general): for the Dems, Ned Lamont leads Dan Malloy 39-22, while for the GOP Tom Foley leads Michael Fedele and Oz Griebel 39-12-2.

• IL-Sen: With a growing sense that many Illinois residents would prefer to vote for neither Mark Kirk nor Alexi Giannoulias, a new right-winger with money to burn looks like he’s daring to go where Patrick Hughes didn’t. Mike Niecestro says he’s a “disgusted Republican who has had it with the people the party throws at us,” and differentiates himself from Kirk on cap-and-trade and immigration. Just another random teabagger who’s all talk and no $$$? No, Niecestro says he already has the 25,000 signatures he needs to qualify before the June 21 deadline, and also has $1 million of his own money ready to go, along with another $100K he’s raised elsewhere. Even if he winds up pulling in only a few percent off Kirk’s right flank, that could be what that Giannoulias needs to squeak by in what otherwise looks to be a close race.

• NV-Sen: Jon Scott Ashjian is turning into something of the white whale for the Nevada GOP. Even though his candidate lost the primary, Dan Burdish, former political director for Sue Lowden, is still filing complaints with the SoS’s office to get Ashjian off the ballot. It doesn’t look like it’ll go anywhere, though; Ashjian himself has qualified for the ballot, easily meeting the low 250-vote signature hurdle even though the “Tea Party” didn’t meet the signature requirements for its own ballot line. Of course, competing right-wing third party the Independent American Party is still trying to get Ashjian off the ballot too, and now the teabaggers in general have turned on Ashjian (who never really had much support from them in the first place) since one of their own, Sharron Angle, managed to snare the GOP nod.

• NY-Sen, NY-Sen-B (pdf): Siena has yet another poll out of both the Senate races in New York. There’s still very little of interest to report. Kirsten Gillibrand leads Bruce Blakeman 48-27, David Malpass 49-24, and Joe DioGuardi 47-29. DioGuardi leads the GOP primary over Blakeman and Malpass, 21-7-3. Chuck Schumer leads Jay Townsend 60-26 and Gary Berntsen 59-27. Townsend leads Berntsen in the other GOP primary, 20-15.

• SC-Sen: Vic Rawl, who lost the Democratic nomination to the baffling Alvin Greene last week, is now formally contesting the results of the election. The state party’s 92-member executive committee will meet on Thursday to hear evidence, but it’s unlikely they’ll do anything, as there’s no precedent in South Carolina for throwing out a primary election’s results.

• WA-Sen: The state GOP convention was over the weekend in Washington; unlike, say, Utah or Connecticut, there’s nothing at stake here, but the general sense in terms of signage, applause, and the like, was that the party’s activist base is pretty jazzed about Sarah Palin-endorsed Clint Didier, and much more tepid about Dino Rossi than they were in 2008, when he was a more apt vehicle for their resentments. A straw poll at a Patriot Coalition event associated with the convention (a subset of a subset of the most hardcore base, so take with much salt) gave Didier a 99-12 edge over Rossi.

• AL-Gov: Artur Davis isn’t giving up on being a douchebag just because he lost the gubernatorial nomination; he said he isn’t sure how Ron Sparks is going to be able to win the uphill fight in the general election, and that Sparks will need something “broader than bingo” to win. Also, this is a very strange time to be making any major staff changes, let alone plunging into what Reid Wilson is describing as “turmoil:” fresh off the triumph of (probably) making the GOP gubernatorial runoff against Bradley Byrne, Robert Bentley just sacked his campaign manager, communications director, and new media director. Bentley is bringing in members of the Mike Huckabee camp to take over (with Huckabee son-in-law Bryan Sanders the new CM), but it seems like his small-time help didn’t get demoted, but instead rudely shown the door by the new bosses.

• CO-Gov: Businessman Joe Gesundheit Schadenfreude Weltschmerz Gschwendtner has pulled the plug on his Republican gubernatorial bid, without endorsing anybody else. He wasn’t able to round up enough signatures to qualify, which is odd, considering that people only need to be able to spell their own names, not his.

• FL-Gov: With his once-clear path to the GOP nomination suddenly looking to be on life support, Bill McCollum got some help from a key GOP establishment figure: Mitt Romney. Romney will appear at two Sunshine State fundraisers today, handing out endorsements like candy to a number of other Republicans in better position too.

• IA-Gov: You may recall that, in the wake of Terry Branstad’s closer-than-expected victory over social conservative Bob vander Plaats, we lamented that the Dems didn’t try any Gray Davis-style meddling in the primary to get the more-conservative, less-electable guy over the top. Well, it turns out they did try a little of that; the Dems launched an independent expenditure committee called “Iowans for Responsible Government” that ran ads on Fox News and sent direct mail attacking Branstad for tax hikes and putting his face on a liberal Mt. Rushmore next to Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Nancy Pelosi. While it didn’t seal the deal, it may have contributed to the underwhelming showing by Branstad.

• MI-Gov: AG Mike Cox won the endorsement of Michigan Right to Life, a big endorsement that will help him as he fights for the social conservative vote in the GOP primary with Rep. Peter Hoekstra. Cox might be the Republican we most want to face out of the GOP field; Rasmussen joined the crowd today in finding that he polls the weakest against either Democrat.

• NY-Gov (pdf): Siena also polled the gubernatorial race; again, nothing noteworthy here, other than Andrew Cuomo having lost a few points since last time. Cuomo leads Rick Lazio 60-24, and leads Carl Paladino 65-23. Party-endorsed Lazio leads Paladino (assuming he can successfully petition onto the ballot) in the GOP primary, 45-18. Meanwhile, the race may get slightly more interesting as gadflyish New York city councilor Charles Barron seems to be moving forward on his quixotic plans to create a whole third party (New York Freedom Democratic Party) for a challenge to the left, mostly to protest Cuomo putting together an all-white ticket.

• OH-Gov: Incumbent Dem Ted Strickland won the NRA endorsement today, instead of GOP ex-Rep. John Kasich. That may seem a surprise, but Strickland has a lifetime “A” rating from the NRA while Kasich was always an unusually anti-gun Republican.

• GA-12: The Hill details how Rep. John Barrow’s fundraising from fellow Dems has fallen way off this year, perhaps an indication of blowback over his “no” vote on HCR. He’s only gotten money directly from five Democratic colleagues and five others’ PACs, compared with 53 in 2006 and 22 in 2008. (An alternative explanation, of course, is that he’s in no major trouble in the general election this year and that money may be more needed elsewhere.) Barrow still has the AFL-CIO’s endorsement, and about a 20:1 CoH advantage over primary challenger Regina Thomas. Speaking of one of his minor GOP opponents, Carl Smith, the fire chief of the small town of Thunderbolt, has a less-appealing resume now that he just got canned by his city council, which opted to stop paying for a fire department and return to an all-volunteer operation.

• IN-03: The Indiana state GOP met over the weekend to pick a nominee to fill the spot left behind by the resigned Rep. Mark Souder. It wasn’t much of a surprise: they picked state Sen. Marlin Stutzman, an up-and-comer who gave Dan Coats a challenge in the GOP Senate primary. Stutzman won on the second ballot, with state Rep. Randy Borror a distant second. It was a double pick: Stutzman will be replace Souder as the GOP candidate in the general election, and also will be the GOP’s candidate in the special election that will also be held on Election Day in November (which, assuming he wins, will allow him to serve in the post-election lame duck session).

• NC-02: Rep. Bob Etheridge, usually one of the more low-key members of the House, had an embarrassing flip-out in front of two GOP trackers/college students asking him if he “supported the Obama agenda,” grabbing one of them and his camera. Etheridge subsequently issued a statement apologizing.

• Polltopia: PPP is soliciting opinions on where the poll next, both multiple-choice and open-ended. Let ’em know what burning questions you’d like answered.

FL-Sen: Not unexpectedly, Charlie Crist vetoed a bill (passed by Flordia’s Republican state lege and supported by anti-choice groups) which would have required women seeking an abortion to first get an ultrasound. Marco Rubio and Kendrick Meek both fired off press releases attacking Crist – the former for abandoning conservative principles, and the latter for trying to “run away” from his “anti-choice past.”

KY-Sen: We’ve mentioned this before, but now the Louisville Courier-Journal has a lengthy piece looking at Rand Paul’s renegade ophthalmology certification organization, called the National Board of Opthalmology. It turns out that the American Board of Medical Specialties – the meta-group which certifies this country’s certifying organizations – doesn’t recognize Paul’s concoction. Rather, they recognize the American Board of Ophthalmology, from whom Paul used to have a certification, but which he let lapse some years ago.

SC-Sen: So now even the White House is weighing in on the mysterious primary victory of Alvin Greene, with senior advisor David Axelrod saying he thinks Green’s win “doesn’t appear” legitimate. This widespread establishment skepticism may enoucrage loser Vic Rawl to file a formal protest with the state Democratic Party, something he has until noon today to do. The party could void the result if it found serious flaws, but state chair Carol Fowler says something like that is “pretty rare.” And Nathan Gonzales also makes a good point: Greene may have spent $0 on this race, but Rawl didn’t spent a whole lot more – just $45K.

UT-Sen (pdf): Wilson Research Strategies for Mike Lee (6/10, likely voters):

Mike Lee (R): 39

Tim Bridgewater (R): 30

Undecided: 31

(MoE: ±5.7%)

AL-Gov: This seems a little odd: lame duck AG Troy King (who just lost the GOP primary) issued an advisory opinion saying that the July 13th Republican gubernatorial runoff ballot should feature the names of Bradley Byrne and Robert Bentley – even if third-place finisher Tim James displaces Bentley in a planned recount. King advises that another runoff take place if James’s recount is successful.

MI-Gov: Fifth CD Rep. Dale Kildee endorsed Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero in the Democratic primary, the first member of the House from Michigan to weigh in in the gubernatorial race. His nephew Dan Kildee, who considered running himself, also got behind Bernero.

NH-Gov: Democratic Gov. John Lynch formally filed for re-election last Friday. He’s seeking a fourth consecutive two-year term, something no one has won before in New Hampshire history. A piece in the Laconia Citizen looks at the challenges Lynch faces in achieving this goal.

OH-Gov: Gov. Ted Strickland reported raising $1.3 million between April 23rd and June 10th, giving him $7.7 million cash-on-hand and $11.5 million raised for the entire campaign (which his camp says is a record). Politico also says that Strickland has raised more than any other Dem governor seeking re-election, but note that only seven fall into this category. Meanwhile, Republican John Kasich raised the same amount but has $5.7 million on hand.

UT-Gov: Ah, timing is everything in politics. Just four days after Gov. Gary Hebert called for more oil drilling in Utah, a Chevron pipeline burst a leak, spilling 500 barrels oil into Salt Lake City’s Red Butte Creek, forcing the closure of the city’s biggest park. (Click the link for a pic. More here.)

AR-01: The link is behind a paywall, so we don’t have much to go on, but apparently Tim Wooldridge is “hedging” on an endorsement of Chad Causey, the man who beat him in the runoff last week. Let’s hope this changes soon.

AR-02: Also behind a paywall (at the Hotline) is this tidbit that state Sen. Joyce Elliott (D) said she “doesn’t know” whether she’d support Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House. Elliott, who has a liberal reputation, probably has some re-positioning to do to remain competitive in this race, but is acting Pelosi-agnostic really plausible? Even Mike Oliverio eventually backed down from this perch – and he’s infinitely more conservative than Elliott.

CT-04: A supporter of Dan Debicella says her name fraudulently appeared on a nominating petition for rival Tom Herrmann, who is also seeking the GOP nod to take on Rep. Jim Himes in the fall. Stories like this don’t tend to have much legs, though, unless there turns out to be widespread fraud.

GA-09: Representative-elect Tom Graves (R) will be sworn in to the House later today. Note that the two other remaining vacancies in the House – NY-29 and IN-03, both the product of resignations due to scandal – will not be filled until November. Also, Graves is not out of the woods yet, as he still faces a regular July 20th primary for the fall general election.

MD-01: Looks like Andy Harris has gone, at least, birther-curious. During a recent radio appearance, Harris refused to dismiss a caller’s accusation that Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship is “false”, saying that he doesn’t know why all the details on Obama’s birth certificate are “being hidden”. (J)

MS-01: Kumbaya, my lord, kumbaya. There seem to be no hurt feelings in this GOP primary, after all. After initially refusing to endorse primary winner Alan Nunnelee, former Fox News commentator Angela McGlowan has endorsed his campaign in an email to her supporters. Second-place finisher Henry Ross also threw his endorsement to Nunnelee, making the circle complete and activating the powers of Captain Planet. (J)

NC-08: Mountain of Crazy Tim D’Annunzio has upped his personal investment in his bid for the GOP nomination against Larry Kissell to $1.3 million. Harold Johnson, the guy whom the NRCC desperately wants to see win the primary, is getting out-gunned; he only raised $49K in the pre-runoff period, and is getting outspent by a greater than 2-1 margin. (J)

NY-24: The Oneida County District Attorney’s office is investigating quid pro quo allegations surrounging a 2008 donation that Republican candidate Richard Hanna made to the Oneida County Independence Party. (J)

SC-01: Politico’s Alex Isenstadt tweets that House GOP leaders are “launching [a] full scale effort for Tim Scott”, the African-American state Rep. who’s locked in a runoff with legacy candidate Paul Thurmond. Karl Rove himself is even cutting a check for Scott. (J)

UT-02: Dem Rep. Jim Matheson certainly doesn’t appear to be taking any chances in his first-ever primary against retired teacher/activist Claudia Wright. Matheson’s pre-primary FEC filing shows that his campaign has brought in $142K and spent nearly $467K since Wright shocked Matheson by forcing a primary at the May Democratic convention, leaving the incumbent with just over a million in the bank. Wright, for her part, only raised $15K during that time, and spent $17K. (J)

WA-02: Moose alert! Sarah Palin gave her latest Twitter endorsement to Snohomish County councilman John Koster, who’s seeking a rematch against Democratic Rep. Rick Larsen. Koster faces absolute nutball John Carmack in the Republican primary. Be sure to scroll to the bottom of Carmack’s website. (J)