Meanwhile, third wheel state Sen. Paula Dockery said she wouldn’t put her personal wealth into her campaign – and also opined that she’d veto an abortion bill she voted for if she became governor. I’m not even sure John Kerry could come up with something that good.
Tag: Ed Case
HI-01 Results Thread
1:35am: Populista makes a very good point about this whole “Hawaii loves its incumbents” meme: Hawaii’s only ever had 11 federal officeholders total before tonight – and virtually none ever faced a competitive general election.
12:39am: Here’s another observation, for what it’s worth. George W. Bush’s percentage in this district in 2004: 47%. Charles Djou’s percentage tonight: 40%.
12:32am: Good as they were in PA-12, Hanabusa’s 2nd place tonight shows that the DCCC needs to be careful about treating its own polling as the word of god.
12:29am: Just an observation: Djou’s winning percentage (40%) is the lowest of any sitting House member. The next-lowest: Jean Schmidt (45%) and Michele Bachmann (46%). Good company!
12:19am: So, in terms of the raw vote, Djou has 67,274 to Hanabusa’s 52,445. Ed Case, the candidate the DCCC thought was the more electable choice, is lagging in third with 47,012 votes.
12:17am: The Associated Press calls it for Charles Djou!
12:12am: Uh, okay, that was fast. 96% of the vote is in, and Republican Charles Djou has won 40% of the vote. Hanabusa has 31%, and Ed Case has 28%.
Voting will officially end in an hour for Hawaii’s special election to replace Neil Abercrombie in the House. We’ll be using this thread to follow the results as they come in.
RESULTS: Associated Press | Office of Elections | Honolulu Advertiser
SSP Daily Digest: 5/17 (Morning Edition)
Still, Ward might yet win. An independent poll last week from Greg Smith & Associates showed Ward leading Raul Labrador in the primary, 34-16, but with 50% undecided. The general election numbers (PDF) are really weird, though – Smith tested Rep. Walt Minnick “jungle-style” against both Labrador and Ward together. Yeah, Idaho doesn’t do their elections that way, so I don’t get the choice, but in any event, Minnick was at 50% with both Republicans combining for 20%.
Undeterred, the DCCC just chipped in another $40K for ads. Also, we mentioned the SEIU’s big ad buy here last week – click this link if you want to see the ad itself.
SSP Daily Digest: 5/14 (Morning Edition)
SSP Daily Digest: 5/11 (Morning Edition)
SSP Daily Digest: 5/7 (Afternoon Edition)
• CA-Sen: Hell hath no fury like a teabagger scorned, and now the swarm is turning its anger on the queen bee. Even Sarah Palin’s popularity apparently has limits, as she’s getting all sorts of blowback (at her Facebook page, mostly) from California’s right-wingers upset over her endorsement of corporate GOPer Carly Fiorina instead of true believer Chuck DeVore.
• KY-Sen: Research 2000, on behalf of various local news outlets, polled the primaries in Kentucky, finding, in the Democratic field, Dan Mongiardo leading Jack Conway 39-32 (with 12 opting for one of the three minor candidates). On the GOP side, Rand Paul leads Trey Grayson 44-32. The same poll has perilously low approvals for Majority leader Mitch McConnell, down to 41/49. And guess who’s taking notice? Democratic state Auditor Crit Luallen — one of our commenters, nrimmer, reports that she’s sending out fundraising e-mails raising the possibility of a 2014 challenge.
Dan Mongiardo is also out with an internal poll, in the wake of the Conway camp releasing one with Conway in the lead. Mongo’s poll, taken by Garin Hart Yang, has him up 46-34 (although he can’t be psyched about the trendlines; his internal poll from February had him up 43-25). One other note from this race: an Iowa-based group, American Future Fund, is running an anti-Paul ad on TV. AFF claims to be about “free market views,” so I’m not sure what their beef with Paul is (you don’t get much more free market than that), but at any rate, their ad features a chiming cuckoo clock in it, which nicely underscores Paul’s, um, cuckoo-ness.
• NC-Sen: Third-place finisher Kenneth Lewis finds himself in something of the kingmaker’s seat, after preventing Elaine Marshall or Cal Cunningham from avoiding a runoff in the Democratic primary. Lewis says he’s not sure who he’ll endorse or even if he will endorse, but both camps are, naturally, reaching out to him and his supporters (including Mel Watt and Harvey Gantt).
• PA-Sen/PA-Gov (pdf): There’s clearly a lot of day-to-day volatility in the Muhlenberg/Morning Call daily tracker of the Dem primaries, but you can’t deny this is a blockbuster result: Joe Sestak has drawn even with Arlen Specter for the first time, as they tie at 43-all today. Maybe that ad with all those purdy pictures of him with George Bush and Sarah Palin is having the desired effect? On the gubernatorial side, Dan Onorato is at 35, Joe Hoeffel at 11, Anthony Williams at 10, and Jack Wagner at 8.
• UT-Sen: Tomorrow may well be the end of the line for Bob Bennett, the three-term Senator from Utah. He’s poised to get kicked to the curb at tomorrow’s nominating convention by his state’s far-right activist base for the crime of actually trying to legislate. Bennett’s getting some last-minute hits from robocalls from the Gun Owners of America, but that’s pretty tame compared with some of the other over-the-top attacks being leveled at other candidates (like Mike Lee as Hitler?). Michael Steele, wary of treading on the base’s toes in a no-win situation, has announced his staying neutral in the nominating process.
• MA-Gov: Looks like you don’t want to get on Tim Cahill’s bad side (or maybe more accurately, on the bad side of media consultant John Weaver, who’s also working on the oddball campaigns of Rick Snyder in Michigan and Steve Levy in New York). After a hard hit from the RGA, the Cahill camp retaliated with a web video pegging RGA chair Haley Barbour as a Confederate sympathizer and corrupt lobbyist. The RGA fired back saying the Cahill camp had responded like “scalded apes” (strange metaphor, but it has a certain evocative charm).
• OR-Gov: That SurveyUSA poll that had Republican primary results that was leaked a few days ago is fully available now, and it also contains Democratic primary results. John Kitzhaber seems poised to roll over Bill Bradbury; he leads 54-16. (As reported earlier, Chris Dudley led on the GOP side, although only at 28%.)
• RI-Gov: The DGA is going on the offensive against independent Lincoln Chafee, seeing him (and certainly not Republican John Robitaille) as their main impediment to picking up the governor’s office. They’ve launched an anti-Chafee site… and here’s an indication of the candidates’ positioning in this scrambled race: they’re actually attacking Chafee from the right, focusing on Chafee’s love of taxes.
• HI-01: One candidate who isn’t running away from Barack Obama is Ed Case, who’s up with a new TV ad throwing his arms around the hometown favorite. “Only one candidate is strong enough to stand with the President: Ed Case!” intones the ad. Despite the White House’s behind-the-scenes finger-on-the-scale, though, Obama hasn’t officially come out in favor of Case.
• ID-01: I wonder what think tank the right-wing’s current fixation with the 17th Amendment recently bubbled up from? I thought it was a weird aberration when Steve Stivers started up about it, but now it’s an issue in the GOP primary in the 1st, where all of a sudden the two contestants, Raul Labrador and Vaughn Ward, are trying to out-Seventeenther each other. Has Frank Luntz actually tried running the idea through one of his focus groups of taking away people’s rights to vote for their Senators? Somehow I doubt it polls well.
• WATN?: Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Former Republican state Senate majority leader Joe Bruno just got sentenced to two years in federal prison for fraud and abuse of office. It’s worth noting, though, that the sentence was stayed until the SCOTUS can rule on the “honest services” issue that’s before it, so it could be a long time, if ever, before Bruno’s wearing stripes.
HI-01: DCCC May Pull Out
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is re-evaluating whether to continue to spend money in this month’s Hawaii special election, Chairman Chris Van Hollen told POLITICO Thursday. […]
Asked if the committee would continue to spend money in the 1st District special election, Van Hollen responded: “We’ll have to re-evaluate based on the situation. The Democrats haven’t been able to come together and resolve this issue. Right now, it’s extremely difficult. So right now, we’ll have to re-evaluate that.” […]
“I think you’ve got a very difficult situation. In that special election you’ve got three candidates – two of them Democrats,” said Van Hollen. “It’s very clear they’re splitting the vote. We’ve worked very hard to get that resolved, and unfortunately the Hawaii Democratic Party has not been able to sort that out. So that is what it is. All I can say about that is – regardless of what happens – right now, it’s extremely challenging, given the lineup. So it would be a different situation in November, obviously.”
It sounds like the DCCC is ready to kick the can on this race all the way to November, more or less letting the chips fall where they may for the special election on May 22nd. That’s a pretty huge development for a party that hasn’t lost one of their own seats in a special election in nearly a decade, but these are obviously exceptional circumstances.
Meanwhile, Independent Women’s Voice, a conservative 501 (c)(4) organization with ties to Lynne Cheney, is spending $200,000 on attack ads against Democrat Ed Case during the home stretch.
HI-01: Hanabusa Will Not Drop Out
Uh, everything’s under control. Situation normal:
State Senate President Colleen Hanabusa said today that she would not drop out of the special election for Congress.
“I’m in this race until the end, and I’m in this race to win,” Hanabusa said at a news conference at her campaign headquarters off Ward Avenue.
How are things with you?
SSP Daily Digest: 5/4 (Afternoon Edition)
• NH-Sen: I’m still hazy on the backstory here, but it’s never a good sign when Politico is running big headlines titled “Fraud case complicates Ayotte bid.” New Hampshire’s Bureau of Securities Regulation director, Mark Connelly, just resigned his job to become a whistleblower, alleging a cover-up by the AG’s office and state banking commission in a fraud case where Financial Resources Mortgage Inc. defrauded New Hampshire investors out of at least $80 million. Connelly was pushing for charges against FRM as early as 2006; the AG in question, of course, was Kelly Ayotte, who resigned her post in mid-2009. Discovery in the matter may be complicated because all of Ayotte’s e-mail and calendars were wiped from her computer after she left the AG’s office.
• PA-Sen, PA-Gov (pdf): It looks like Muhlenberg College (on behalf of the Morning Call) is actually going to be doing a daily tracker on the Democratic primary races in the next two weeks as we count down to May 18. Today they find an even narrower gap in the suddenly-closer Arlen Specter/Joe Sestak race: Specter leads Sestak 46-42. Dan Onorato’s numbers in the gubernatorial race aren’t quite as showy, but still dominant: he’s at 36, with Anthony Williams at 9, Joe Hoeffel at 8, and Jack Wagner at 8. Quinnipiac also has similar numbers out today: they also have Specter leading Sestak by only single digits, at 47-39 (down from 53-32 a month ago). In the governor’s race, Qpac finds Onorato at 36, Hoeffel at 9, Wagner at 8, and Williams at 8. The DSCC seems to be sensing some trouble here for their preferred candidate, and they’re dipping into their treasury to help Specter out: the DSCC chipped in for $300K in Specter’s last $407K TV ad buy. Sestak just kicked off TV advertising two weeks ago but is going all in, outspending Specter in the last two weeks, which obviously coincides with his late surge.
• AZ-Gov: That Behavior Research Center poll of AZ-Sen from a few weeks ago contained a Republican gubernatorial primary question as well. Their findings mirror the other most recent polls of the primary: vulnerable incumbent Jan Brewer strengthened her hand among GOP primary voters by signing Arizona’s immigration law into effect. She’s at 22, not a lock but well ahead of any opposition: Owen Buz Mills is at 13, Dean Martin is at 10, and John Munger is at 4. (If your calculator isn’t handy, that leaves 51% undecided.)
• NH-Gov (pdf): Univ. of New Hampshire is out with another look at New Hampshire’s gubernatorial race, where Democratic incumbent John Lynch is well in control but still facing a tougher race than the last few times. They find Lynch leads GOP challenger John Stephen 49-32, little changed from the February poll where Lynch led 50-30.
• WI-Gov: Ex-Rep. Mark Neumann is very much the underdog in the Republican primary in the gubernatorial race (as the DC and local establishments have both embraced Milwaukee Co. Executive Scott Walker instead). But he added a hard-right endorsement to his trophy cabinet today; he got the nod from Tom Coburn.
• GA-08: In a clear sign that state Rep. Austin Scott (who recently bailed out of a long-shot gubernatorial campaign) is the man to beat in the GOP primary in the 8th, Angela Hicks got out of the race, saying she didn’t want to hurt Scott’s chances. Local businesswoman Hicks seemed to be considered the frontrunner among the GOPers prior to Scott’s entry, more by virtue of being the least weak rather than the strongest.
• HI-01: Barack Obama recorded a robocall for Democratic voters in his hometown district. Despite reports that the White House is joining the DCCC is putting a finger on the scale in favor of Ed Case rather than Colleen Hanabusa in the screwy special election, Obama didn’t name names; he simply urged a vote for “a Democrat.”
• NH-02: The largely forgotten state Rep. John DeJoie, the third wheel in the Democratic primary to replace Paul Hodes, cut short his bid today. Despite generally being regarded as from the progressive side of the ledger, DeJoie threw his support to Katrina Swett. DeJoie’s departure, on the balance, may help Ann McLane Kuster, though, by not splitting the progressive vote.
• PA-12: I have no idea whether this is good strategy or not, but Mark Critz, hoping to replace former boss John Murtha, is clinging hard to Murtha’s legacy in his new TV ad, seeming to put a lot of faith in polling data showing Murtha still a very popular figure in the district. Critz blasts back at Tim Burns for his own TV spots focusing on Murtha’s ethical woes, telling Burns ungrammatically to stop attacking “someone not there to defend themselves.” Meanwhile, the fight’s on for Murtha’s money: $7K from Murtha’s PAC found its way into Democratic pockets (including $5K for Critz), but the bulk of Murtha’s leftover money is headed for a charitable foundation established by his widow.
• CA-St. Sen.: For fans of legislative special elections, it looks like the marquee event between now and November will be the fight for California’s SD-15, a Dem-leaning central coast district vacated by Republican now-Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado. Republican Assemblyman Sam Blakeslee just got in the race, giving the GOP a solid contender to try and hold the seat as Dems try to push closer to the 2/3s mark in the Senate; he’ll face off against Democratic ex-Assemblyman John Laird in the June 22 election. (If neither candidate breaks 50%, there’ll be an Aug. 17 runoff.)
• Redistricting: Lots of redistricting-related action this week, going in two different directions. In Florida, the GOP-held legislature placed a redistricting measure on the November ballot that partially contradicts two citizen initiatives on the ballot that would prevent the legislature from drawing maps that favor one political party. The new proposal would still allow the legislature to take “communities of interest” into consideration when drawing maps. In Illinois, though, two attempts to change redistricting both failed, when the legislature couldn’t muster the votes to put it on the November ballot. Illinois’s arcane methods (which involve breaking ties by pulling a name out of a hat) will apparently still apply for the 2012 redistricting round.
• Deutschland: Our man in Cologne, SSPer micha.1976 has a hilarious and remarkable find from the streets of Germany. Remember the impeach-Obama Larouchie, Kesha Rogers, who won the Democratic nomination in TX-22? Her image is now being used on posters for a like-minded LaRouchie candidate in Germany! (J)
HI-01: White House Pushing for Case
Ben Smith reports that senior White House officials and DCCC staffers are circulating new polling numbers showing Ed Case in a much better position than Colleen Hanabusa in the May 22nd special election to fill the seat of ex-Rep. Neil Abercrombie:
The White House and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee see former Rep. Ed Case as a stronger candidate than State Senate President Colleen Hanabusa in a race that has divided Democrats. Hanabusa has the support of much of the state’s establishment, including both senators and key labor unions. […]
Harstad’s poll is the latest weapon in intense efforts to push Hanabusa out of the race, or at least move some of her institutional supporters to Case’s side.
“It is clear from this data — as from all the public polling – that Ed Case is the best chance that our party has of holding on to that seat,” said a senior White House official. “Given where Hanabusa is in al of this research, one has to be concerned about what the likely out come is if the dynamic remains unchanged.”
There are “a lot of conversations” under way between Washington Democrats and Hanabusa’s key supporters, the official said, though the official declined to make the White House’s goal explicit.
Am I the only one tired of these scaredy-cat blind quotes from anonymous “senior White House officials”? I hope someone asks Gibbs about this at his next presser. In any event, based on this memo, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the DCCC go all in for Ed Case pretty soon.
Harstad Research for the DCCC (4/26-28, likely voters):
Charles Djou (R): 36
Ed Case (D): 34
Colleen Hanabusa (D): 20
Undecided: 13
(MoE: ±4.4%)
The full polling memo is available below the jump.