Tag: Charles Djou

The DCCC has been telegraphing this for most of a week (ever since Colleen Hanabusa’s press conference to announce that she wasn’t dropping out), but it’s official today:

The DCCC is pulling out of the race to replace ex-Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI), effectively ceding the heavily Dem seat to the GOP as intra-party feuding splits the vote.

“The DCCC will not be investing additional resources in the HI-01 (Abercrombie-open) special election. Local Democrats were unable to work out their differences,” DCCC communications director Jennifer Crider said in an emailed statement. “The DCCC will save the resources we would have invested in the Hawaii special election this month for the general election in November.”

It had been at least a week since the Dems invested any money in this race, but they’d spent $314K on anti-Charles Djou advertising (as well as sending around a Barack Obama robocall advising a vote “for a Democrat”). With about one in five (60K out of 317K) of the election’s mail-in ballots already returned (the deadline is May 22 for the all-mail election), the die is already looking pretty well cast, meaning the outcome could be set even with a last-minute NY-23 bombshell where one candidate bails out.

So it’s come to this:

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.

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?

An all-House digest today – and it’s an hour earlier than usual! Remember, today is primary day in IN, NC & OH, so be sure to check out SSP’s handy election guide.

AL-07: Attorney Terri Sewell, who is probably the candidate ideologically closest to outgoing Rep. Artur Davis, is going up with a TV ad buy in Montgomery and Birmingham which will stay up through the primary (which is a month from now). No word on the size of the buy, though.

CT-02: Republicans are courting former television news anchor Janet Peckinpaugh to run against Rep. Joe Courtney, who has luckily skated by without much in the way of opposition this cycle. Peckinpaugh says she’s considering it. She was most recently seen shilling for a now-defunct mortgage company in deceptive, TV news-like ads, clearly trading on her reputation as a newsreader. The company, Lend America, shut down in December after it was placed under federal investigation.

FL-12: After screwing up the establishment’s efforts to clear the GOP primary field for ex-state Rep. Dennis Ross by jumping into the race, Polk County Comm’r Randy Wilkinson is bidding adieu to the Republican Party. Instead, he’s going to run as the Tea Party candidate (there’s an actual Tea Party in Florida, just like the Whigs). Wilkinson has raised very little money – his FEC reports are a mess, and he seems to like filing them in hand-written form, so he doesn’t even appear in their electronic database.

FL-21: What a bummer – zero Dems filed in the open 21st CD, which means that Mario Diaz-Balart will automatically inherit his brother Lincoln’s seat. I can’t really blame folks too much, though, as Florida has especially onerous ballot access requirements. If you don’t petition on, you have to pay a filing fee, which is an insane $10,000+.

HI-01: The DCCC threw down another $70K for negative ads against Charles Djou.

ID-01, OH-15: We mentioned the other day that GOPer Steve Stivers, busy with a rematch against Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy in OH-15, said he favors repealing the 17th amendment – the one which gives citizens the right to vote for their senators (rather than having them be appointed by state legislatures). Well, after taking a lot of much-deserved heat, he’s backed off that fantasy. But his would-be colleague, Vaughn Ward, is taking up the mantle. Ward, running against Rep. Walt Minnick in ID-01, offered a rationale worthy of Miss Teen South Carolina, saying “When you look at how come state’s rights have been so abrogated, it’s because of things like the 17th Amendment that has taken away those rights from our states.” Yuh huh. Exactly.

IL-08: Just click the link and read about the greatest political implosion of the entire cycle. (Thankfully, it’s the bad guys.) More here, here, and here.

KS-03: Along with Joe Garcia (see yesterday’s morning digest), the DCCC added another candidate to their Red to Blue list, Stephene Moore, who is the wife of retiring Rep. Dennis Moore.

MA-10: State Rep. Jeff Perry, running for Bill Delahunt’s open seat, scored an endorsement from ex-MA Gov. Mitt Romney. Perry, who was also previously endorsed by Sen. Scott Brown, has a primary against ex-state Treasurer Joe Malone. Malone has some baggage-related cooties, which probably explains Perry’s run of good fortune.

MD-01 (PDF): Public Opinion Strategies (R) for Americans for Prosperity (R) (4/25-26, likely voters, no trendlines):

Frank Kratovil (D-inc): 36

Andy Harris (R): 39

Richard Davis (L): 6

Other: 1

Undecided: 18

(MoE: ±4.9%)

Two things about this poll: First off, in contravention of appropriate practice, POS asked all kinds of axe-grindy issue questions (“Gov. O’Malley raised taxes by $1.3 billion”) before getting to the horserace question. This does damage to POS’s reputation as a supposedly respectable pollster. Secondly, the weird thing is that Harris switched pollsters – and his last survey, from the Tarrance Group back in November, had him up by a whopping 52-39. While it’s not a proper trendline, you gotta wonder – is Harris slipping? Or is he getting snowed by his various pollsters? (Update: D’oh! Our mistake — this poll was not done for Harris, but actually the right-wing consortium of douches known as the Americans for Prosperity.)

MI-01: Dem state Rep. Joel Sheltrown, who got into the race to replace Bart Stupak just a few weeks ago, is bowing out.

MI-09: Self-funder Gene Goodman is dropping out of the race to take on Rep. Gary Peters, despite having loaned his campaign $450K. That leaves ex-state Rep. Andrew “Rocky” Raczkowski and former Oakland County GOP Chair Paul Welday in the running, both of whom have had unimpressive fundraising – and in fact, Rocky is yet another victim (albeit a more minor one) of Base Connect.

Meanwhile, we missed a Welday internal poll from a couple of weeks ago (taken by Mitchell Research & Communications), which had Peters leading by just 44-43. The poll sampled just 300 LVs, though, and according to the Hotline, was in the field at two discontiguous times. Peters’ camp attacked the poll’s sample composition, but Steve Mitchell says he used the same methodology as he did in September of 2008, when (according to the article), ” he declared Peters was going to defeat Joe Knollenberg.” Is this hindsight proving to be 20/20? Mitchell’s poll from back then had the race tied.

NY-13: Global Strategy Group (D) for Mike McMahon (4/7-11, likely voters, no trendlines):

Mike McMahon (D-inc): 56

Mike Allegretti (R): 24

Undecided: 20

Mike McMahon (D-inc): 56

Mike Grimm (R): 23

Undecided: 21

(MoE: ±4.9%)

OH-09: Dem Rep. Marcy Kaptur, who is not really on anyone’s radar in terms of having a competitive race, is nonetheless facing a moneybags challenger. Former Food Town CEO Rich Iott just dumped $319,000 into his campaign. Kaptur has over a million on hand, and the 9th CD voted 62% for Obama and 58% for Kerry.

PA-12: Anzalone-Liszt (D) for the DCCC (4/27-29, likely voters, no trendlines):

Mark Critz (D): 43

Tim Burns (R): 41

(MoE: ±4.9%)

TN-08: A couple of disgusting low-lifes running for TN-08, Ron Kirkland and Randy Smith, had this delightful exchange at a candidate forum:

Kirkland, of Jackson, referred to his Army training during the Vietnam War and said: “I can tell you if there were any homosexuals in that group, they were taken care of in ways I can’t describe to you.”

Smith, a chef from Mercer who served in the Navy during the Gulf War, said: “I definitely wouldn’t want to share a shower with a homosexual. We took care of that kind of stuff, just like (Kirkland) said.”

These sick bastards have serious issues.

SD-AL: Heh – GOP state Rep. Kristi Noem has a biographical spot up on the air, talking about her return to her family farm after her father’s death. The only problem is that she shot the ad in Texas – which became apparent given that the backdrop (a grove of leafy green trees) is something you can’t really find in North South Dakota this time of year. Reminds me of when Bob Schaffer ran an ad pretending that Alaska’s Mount McKinley was actually Colorado’s famous Pikes Peak while running for CO-Sen in 2008.

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.

AR-Sen: Former President and governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton cut two radio ads on behalf of Blanche Lincoln. One of them highlights Lincoln’s alleged support for Clinton’s economic agenda back in the 1990s – not an issue likely to resonate, especially in today’s economic climate.

FL-Sen: A Public Opinion Strategies poll for Charlie Crist, taken before he left the GOP primary, had him at 36, Marco Rubio at 28, and Kendrick Meek at 23. A McLaughlin & Associates poll (taken for “the Associated Industries of Florida,” also before the switcheroo) had Crist up as well, 33C-29R-15M. Meanwhile, The Buzz takes a look at which boldfaced names showed up to Crist’s first fundraiser following his political party reassignment surgery.

On the Dem side, zillionaire mortgage-shorting mogul Jeff Greene says he’ll “spend whatever it takes” to win his primary against Rep. Kendrick Meek. That must be music to Joe Trippi’s ears. Greene is unelectable but thanks to his monstrous bankroll, he can do a lot of harm to Democratic chances in this race. Trippi is aiding and abetting this bullshit, and will profit handsomely.

NY-Sen-B: Chris Dodd, in the midst of working on financial regulation reform, says he won’t attend a Wall Street-sponsored fundraiser on behalf of Kirsten Gillibrand in NYC tonight.

UT-Sen: A poignant poll for Bob Bennett: While Republican delegates to the state convention despise him (he’s in third place with just 16%), rank-and-file Republican voters like him much more (first place, 39%). In other states, the GOP would have cause for concern, since a convention process like this is clearly aimed at producing the most conservative candidate imaginable. But in Utah, it probably won’t matter. Though if Bennett gets toppled, I wonder if other nervous establishment officials might consider eliminating the convention and replacing it with an ordinary primary.

MI-Gov: Thank god: Geoffrey Feiger, Jack Kevorkian’s attorney and the Dems’ disastrous 1998 gubernatorial nominee, says he won’t run again. Now all we have to worry about is Andy Dillon.

HI-Gov, HI-01: Hawaii’s legislature unexpectedly passed a civil unions bill on the last day of the session, which now goes to Gov. Linda Lingle (she has until July 6th to decide whether to sign the bill into law or veto it). Lt. Gov. Duke Aiona (R), running to succeed Lingle, wants her to veto it. Ex-Rep. Neil Abercrombie is strongly in favor of the bill (and gay marriage), while his Democratic primary opponent, Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann, opposes gay marriage but hasn’t expressed an opinion on the current bill.

This may also have repercussions in the HI-01 race, where state Sen. President Colleen Hanabusa may have pushed the bill through in an attempt to repair relations with the LGBT community after the same bill got scuttled in January. Hanabusa says she doesn’t support gay marriage, though, while Democratic rival Ed Case does. Republican Charles Djou opposes the measure.

FL-05: Unsurprisingly, local Republicans are grumbling about Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite’s filing-deadline handoff to Sherriff Ted Richard Nugent, including state Sen. Mike Fasano, who apparently has had his eye on this seat for some time. You have to wonder if this is the kind of thing which will taint Nugent and make him vulnerable to a primary challenge next cycle. Also among the complainers, interestingly, is state Sen. Paula Dockery, whose current district overlaps with the 5th CD. Dockery’s gotten nowhere in her FL-Gov primary against AG Bill McCollum, so you have to wonder if she isn’t gnashing her teeth about a lost opportunity here.

FL-25: Joe Garcia’s candidacy is a rare bright spot for Dems in this otherwise putrid cycle. Now the DCCC, which lobbied heavily for him to get into the race, has given Garcia their official stamp of approval, adding him to their Red to Blue list once again.

GA-09: Dems never had a chance in the special election in this ruby red district, but you gotta figure it’s almost always better to actually have a Democrat on the ballot rather than not. We had a candidate here, pastor Mike Freeman, but he dropped out a couple of weeks ago. Now, though, he says he’s back in the race, but his website is offline.

IN-08: Democratic state Rep. Trent Van Haaften, running to fill Brad Ellsworth’s open seat, has been talking to local teabaggers to see if they might support him. Yeah, I’m in as much disbelief as you are. But, as is always the case, there’s a lot of hostility between the tea partiers and the establishment, and at least one ‘bagger says they want to “teach the machine a lesson.”

PA-12: Freedom’s Defense Fund, an arm of the incredibly dodgy Base Connect (formerly BMW Direct) has made a $20K “independent” expenditure on behalf of Bill Russell, who is challenging Tim Burns in the GOP primary. (Recall that there’s both a special election and a primary on the same day.) FDF is supposedly distinct from Base Connect, but given that they share the same office (according to TPM), the idea that their expenditures are actually “independent” is a real stretch.

More importantly, the NRCC just threw down another quarter million bucks on behalf of Burns, bringing their total spending on this race to over $725K. The DCCC has yet to respond to this latest blast.

DCCC: The DCCC is about to begin its biennial rite of splitting off its independent expenditure arm. Thanks to stupid federal laws against “co-ordination,” the DCCC staffers who make spending decisions about IEs can’t be in contact with the rest of the D-Trip, because those folks are in contact with individual campaigns. This is senseless. Anyhow, political director Robby Mook will head up the IE arm, and John Lapp (who once ran this shop himself) will serve as a “senior advisor.” Incumbent retention director Jennifer Pihlaja will replace Mook as PD of DCCC proper (and keep her current title).

Ward Research for the Honolulu Advertiser (4/23-28, likely voters):

Charles Djou (R): 36

Ed Case (D): 28

Colleen Hanabusa (D): 22

Undecided: 13

(MoE: ±5.2%)

To recap, this is the third poll we’ve seen of this race over the past month. A “leaked” DCCC internal pegged the race at 32 Djou, 32 Case, 27 Hanabusa, while an R2K poll from two weeks ago have Djou a 32-29 lead over Case, with Hanabusa close behind at 28%.

Since then, the DCCC has poured in nearly $250K on media buys against Djou, but we’ve seen no evidence of their efforts yielding any positive results for Team Blue. Hanabusa herself has opened fire on Case’s right-wing record in a new ad that began airing this weekend. If there’s ever been a perfect storm for a Republican to win this seat in freak circumstances with a bare plurality of the vote, this is it.

(H/T: Hotline On Call)

• AR-Sen: The SEIU is turning their amps up to 11 in a final effort to beat Blanche Lincoln in the Democratic primary. They’re ponying up another $1 million for a new TV ad blitz, focusing on Lincoln’s support for NAFTA, CAFTA, and sundry other free-trade deals.

• FL-Sen: Looks like the “Help wanted” sign is going out at Charlie Crists’s office. As expected, much of his top-tier staff evacuated en masse; he lost communications director Andrea Saul, spokesperson Amanda Hennenberg, and campaign counsel Ben Ginsberg (all Beltway types left over from when Crist was the NRSC’s prize pony, who just headed back to the GOP’s mothership). Also former Crist marionette George LeMieux severed his strings: the seat-warming Senator says he won’t support Crist’s independent bid.

• NV-Sen: Imagine that… a Democrat actually taking to the airwaves to explain the benefits of the broadly-misunderstood (or just plain not-understood-at-all) health care reform bill and not just ceding the discursive arena to right-wing radio and astroturfers? Better late than never, I guess. Harry Reid is forging ahead with that, launching three different new TV ads featuring stories from actual Nevadans actually benefiting from HCR.

• OH-Sen (pdf): There’s one more poll of the Democratic Senate primary in Ohio, from Suffolk this time. They find an even bigger edge for Lee Fisher over Jennifer Brunner than did PPP; in fact, Suffolk has Fisher doubling up on her, 55-27. Voters may be thinking strategically: they also find that respondents feel Fisher has a better chance of beating Rob Portman than does Brunner, by a lop-sided 55-15 margin. Brunner voters report that, if Fisher wins the election, 74% will vote for Fisher and 8% for Portman.

• AZ-Gov: PPP has one more installment in its Arizona sample today: the Republican primary in the gubernatorial race. As other pollsters have found, once-wobbly incumbent Jan Brewer has strengthened her primary position (while destabilized her general election position) by signing off on Arizona’s new racial profiling law. Brewer leads the pack at 38, over fractured opposition led by NRA board member Owen Buz Mills at 19, state Treasurer Dean Martin at 16, and former university regent John Munger at 3. (In PPP’s last poll here, from September, Brewer was losing a head-to-head against Martin 37-26.) PPP also did a fantasy-baseball poll that included Maricopa Co. Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who, as he does every four years, has been expressing interest in the race but not moving forward in it. Arpaio wins that version of the primary, taking 33%, with 25 for Brewer, 15 for Martin, 11 for Mills, and 1 for Munger.

• MN-Gov: With the Republican endorsing convention in Minnesota already underway, most media accounts are focusing on Sarah Palin’s last-minute endorsement of state Rep. Tom Emmer, but there’s a more important endorsement at work here in terms of potentially moving some delegates: Norm Coleman is now also backing Emmer and privately making calls to delegates on Emmer’s behalf. The GOPers have already endorsed in some of the downballot races, maybe most notably the Auditor’s race, where they endorsed former Auditor Pat Anderson (who had been running for Governor for a while, until she decided to drop down and try to get her old job back instead).

• UT-Gov: Mason-Dixon, on behalf of the Salt Lake Tribune, took another look at the general election in the Utah governor’s race, which is definitely looking like a heavy lift for Salt Lake County mayor Peter Corroon. The Democrat trails GOP incumbent Gary Herbert 61-30, an even better showing than Herbert’s 55-30 result in January.

• FL-16: Whew. After making some noises about a possible comeback attempt, ex-Rep. Tim Mahoney decided on filing day that he wouldn’t run to get his seat back. He still took a parting shot at Rep. Tom Rooney, saying he’s part of the GOP’s move to the “radical right.” Some Dudes Jim Horn and Ed Tautiva are all the Dems have on the ballot in this R+5 district, unless something changes in the next few hours.

• HI-01: The Republicans continue to very subtly funnel money into the 1st, somewhat mirroring their stealth strategy on how they got similarly-blue MA-Sen off the ground. Rather than the NRCC charging in with both barrels blazing, instead there’s a push for individual House GOP members to contribute directly to Charles Djou; about 40 have done so already.

• IN-02: The National Rifle Association slammed GOP candidate Jackie Walorski. No, that’s not because the right-wing Walorski suddenly had a change of heart on the gun issue; instead, it was because she was claiming the NRA’s endorsement. That was only for her 2008 legislative bid, the NRA said, and she has not been endorsed yet for this year for the different office.

• IN-03: Looks like Rep. Mark Souder isn’t going to be in the House much longer, regardless of how next week’s primary plays out. Brian Howey says Souder has been telling him that he’d already been contemplating retirement in 2012, and the stress of trying to win his unexpectedly-tough primary election has “sealed it” for him.

• PA-04: Here’s a last-minute sign of life for Keith Rothfus, who’d been the leading GOP contender here up until the moment when former US Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan announced (although Rothfus beat Buchanan at fundraising last quarter). He got the endorsement today of Glen Meakem, a wealthy businessman and part-time talk radio host who’s something of a behind-the-scenes power in Republican circles in western Pennsylvania and who had briefly considered a Senate bid last year.

• SC-04: Rep. Bob Inglis’s main threat this year is in the GOP primary, not the general, and he launched two different ads reminding voters that he’s actually pretty conservative. One ad touts his NRA endorsement, while the other runs down the litany of things he opposed (health care reform, stimulus, cap-and-trade, auto industry bailout).

• NY-St. Sen.: A long-time Republican stalwart in the New York state Senate is retiring: Dale Volker (in office since 1975). Democrats looking to pad their narrow majority in the Senate may need to look elsewhere, though; this district in the Buffalo suburbs and surrounding rural counties is one of the most conservative in the state, with a 79K-to-65K GOP registration advantage, and won 54-40 by John McCain.

• Arizona: Arizona has been doing all kinds of weird things lately, and here’s one more to add to the list. One of the few states to not have a Lt. Governor (the SoS is 2nd in line of succession, which is how Jan Brewer became Governor), Arizona is planning to have a Lt. Governor… but only because they would eliminate the SoS position and give all those duties to the LG. What’s even weirder is that they’d start doing what Illinois just decided to stop doing because the results were so uniformly terrible: the Governor and LG candidates will run separately in the primary, but be joined together on one ticket via shotgun wedding for the general election. The idea cleared the legislature, but because it’s a constitutional amendment, the idea has to pass a voter referendum before it becomes law.

• Puerto Rico: The House approved allowing Puerto Rico to hold a plebiscite on its grey-area status (the last one was in 1998, where they decided to remain a commonwealth). It’ll be a two-step vote, where the first vote will ask whether it should remain a commonwealth or not. If the answer is “no,” the second vote will ask whether it should become independent, a U.S. state, still remain a commonwealth, or enter some other sovereign-but-connected-to-the-U.S. status. If it voted for statehood, Congress would still have to approve making it a state. Of course, this has to pass the Senate as well before the vote could happen, so it may get kicked down the road for a while.

• OFA: Nathan Gonzales has a thorough look at the Obama campaign’s state directors, and how they’re part of OFA’s pivot to focus on turning out the same voters for the 2010 midterms. Here’s a handy table of what all the directors are up to these days.

• History: Rhodes Cook has an interesting column that’s been getting linked all over the place in the last couple days: a much more apt comparison for what the Democrats are getting themselves this year, rather than 1994, is 1966. The parallels are that the Democrats were facing some inevitable snap-back after overperforming in the 1964 election (winning nearly 2/3s majorities in each chamber), and the GOP quickly got back up off the mat after the Dems pushed the limits in passing a variety of Great Society legislation (most notably Medicare). Of course, the Democrats still took a bath, losing 47 in the House and 3 in the Senate, so it’s still not really something the Democrats should aspire towards.

• FL-Sen: It’s come down to brass tacks for Charlie Crist. With fast-approaching April 30 the drop-dead date for switching over to an independent bid for the Senate, he’s set a Thursday deadline for making up his mind on the matter. So, we’ll know soon one way or the other.

• MO-Sen, IL-Sen: Robin Carnahan found an excuse to avoid Barack Obama last time he was in Missouri, but, apparently realizing that she needs to rev up her base, she’s appearing with him this week when he visits an ethanol plant in Macon. Obama is also extending some of his cred to the currently very-wobbly Alexi Giannoulias, appearing with him downstate in Quincy on the same road swing.

• NC-Sen: There are two different polls today of the Democratic primary in the North Carolina Senate race, both promising a very close race (with the election one week from today, although a runoff may be in the offing). SurveyUSA’s first look at the field finds SoS Elaine Marshall leading ex-state Sen. Cal Cunningham 23-19, with attorney Kenneth Lewis at 10, miscellaneous others adding up to 15, and 34% undecided. (Marshall has a 33-13 edge among liberals, while Cunningham has narrow leads among moderates and conservatives. And despite Cunningham’s relative youth, he’s in 3rd place among the 18-34 set; Kenneth Lewis actually leads among young voters, but barely makes a dent among older voters.) SurveyUSA also finds Richard Burr cruising in the GOP primary, at 59% with none of his opponents topping 6%. PPP (pdf) has similar numbers; Marshall leads Cunningham 26-23, with Lewis at 7, miscellaneous others at 10, and 34% undecided. (It’s a narrower spread from last month, where PPP saw Marshall leading Cunningham 23-17.)

• NY-Sen: Finally, someone put their head in the chopping block to go up against Chuck Schumer and his $21 million warchest. Republican political consultant and Fox commentator Jay Townsend will try to… well, you can’t even hope to contain Schumer, let alone beat him.

• UT-Sen: There’s yet another poll of the delegates to next month’s Republican convention in Utah, this time by Mason-Dixon on behalf of the Salt Lake Tribune. This one’s pretty bad for Bob Bennett too, suggesting he isn’t likely to even make it to the final round of convention balloting. He’s in third place among delegates’ expressed first choices. Mike Lee is at 37, Tim Bridgewater is at 20, and Bob Bennett is at 16, followed by Cherilyn Eagar at 11. (Inflammatory ex-Rep. Merrill Cook seems to have burned all of his bridges and then bagged and sold all the charcoal, as he’s polling at 1%.) Based on second choices, Lee would win the final round against Bridgewater 44-30, suggesting that Lee can’t nail it down at the convention and that he and Bridgewater would advance to the primary. (Lee wins a Lee/Bennett head-to-head 51-18.) Perhaps the most telling statistic, though, of what a thin slice of the hard right this sample is: of the delegates, 68% say they’re “supporters” of the Tea Party movement. Other Senator Orrin Hatch should be glad he’s not running this year, as he’s sufficiently impure that he’d be getting the same treatment: 71% say they’d be inclined to nominate someone other than Hatch.

• AL-Gov: Ah, nothing beats good old fashioned southern hospitality. Tim James (son of ex-Gov. Fob James), running for Alabama Governor, says he’ll save money by stopping offering the driver’s license test in other languages (because, apparently, complying with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is for suckers). James’s tagline? “This is Alabama. We speak English.”

• GA-Gov: Wealthy teabagger Ray Boyd — who just recently showed up on the scene in the GOP gubernatorial field — balked at signing a Republican “loyalty oath” that’s apparently a mandatory part of running for office as a Republican in Georgia. So, Boyd took his $2 million ball, went home, and is now planning to run as an independent. A few percentage of right-wingers peeled off by Boyd may make all the difference for Democratic ex-Gov. Roy Barnes in a close election, so consider this good news.

• ME-Gov: Former state House speaker John Richardson abruptly dropped out of the Democratic field in the Maine governor’s race. Richardson (already getting little traction, if another candidate’s internal is to be believed) hit ‘eject’ after finding he wouldn’t qualify for Clean Election Act public funding, after the state ethics committee found his campaign fudged documents about qualifying contributions. That brings a little more clarity to the almost-opaque Democratic field, reducing it to state Sen. President Libby Mitchell, ex-AG Steve Rowe, ex-Dept. of Conservation head Pat McGowan, and businesswoman Rosa Scarcelli.

• MN-Gov: This seems like a strange time for Ramsey Co. DA Susan Gaertner to drop out of the gubernatorial race, as she was one of the candidates who was ignoring the DFL nominating convention and planning to forge ahead in the primary regardless. Maybe she was counting on a R.T. Rybak endorsement and thus being the only female candidate in the primary? At any rate, Gaertner cited money woes as the main reason for her dropout; she stopped short of endorsing Margaret Anderson Kelliher but cited the historic nature of electing a female governor and said she didn’t want to be a spoiler for Kelliher.

• UT-Gov: Salt Lake County mayor Peter Corroon sounds like he’s looking to take a page from Brian Schweitzer and Kathleen Sebelius, two popular Dems who overcame their states’ reddish hue with a Republican as a running mate. Corroon didn’t name anyone specific, but said he has some GOPers on his Lt. Gov. short list.

• AL-05: I don’t know if this’ll help Rep. Parker Griffith much with the local rank-and-file (for instance, the Madison Co. Republican Committee, which refused to endorse him), but all of the state’s four other Republican House members endorsed him. Said the former Democrat and Deaniac: “They have seen first-hand how hard I’ve fought Nancy Pelosi’s liberal agenda that will ruin our country if we don’t stop it.”

• FL-25: Buried deep in a Roll Call article about the current state of play in the open seat in the 25th are some numbers from a month-old internal poll by Benenson taken for the DCCC. The poll may explain what got 2008 Democratic candidate Joe Garcia off the fence and back into the fight in the 25th: the poll had Garcia leading state Rep. David Rivera (looking like the likeliest GOP nominee) 38-35. As far as the GOP field goes, it doesn’t seem like rumored candidate state Sen. Alex Diaz de la Portilla is planning to show up; so far, Rivera’s main GOP opposition seems to be attorney Marili Cancio, who says she declined an invitation to the NRCC’s “Young Guns” program.

• HI-01: The DCCC is slapping down an $81K independent expenditure in the 1st. It’s a media buy, not on behalf of either Dem but against GOPer Charles Djou.

• KS-02: Too bad we don’t have much of a candidate on tap in the 2nd to exploit the carnage if the GOP primary goes nuclear. One-term Rep. Lynn Jenkins (who, believe it or not, hails from the “moderate” wing of the party despite a litany of right-wing-sounding gaffes) is getting a challenge from the teabag corps, in the form of state Sen. Dennis Pyle. Pyle has been threatening a bid for many months, but made it official today.

• MO-04: And here’s yet more cat fud, across the state line in Missouri’s 4th. While they haven’t done anything publicly, the NRCC is apparently starting to choose sides in the primary, favoring state Sen. Bill Stouffer over social conservative ex-state Rep. Vicki Hartzler. The NRCC arranged a sitdown between the two candidates, but Hartzler apparently blew it off after finding out the point of the NRCC’s meeting was to encourage her to drop out.

• WA-03: State Rep. Deb Wallace was the first Democrat to jump into the field after Rep. Brian Baird’s retirement; she got out fairly quickly once Denny Heck got in, realizing that she’d have to share the moderate side of the ledger with him and that she wouldn’t be able to compete with Heck’s financial resources. Wallace finally endorsed in the race today, opting for (no surprise here) Heck over the more liberal state Sen. Craig Pridemore (who just picked up the Sierra Club’s endorsement last week). Heck also has Baird’s endorsement, as well as that of Gov. Chris Gregoire.

• CA-Sen, CA-Gov: I’m starting to think there’s some actual truth to this “Whitman is slipping (having passed the point of diminishing returns on saturation advertising)” meme that’s developing, perhaps illustrated most clearly in yesterday’s Rasmussen poll of the general. That may also be at play in the primary, though, where a new poll from Capital Weekly (by Probolsky Research) finds a smaller (though still dominant) edge for Meg Whitman in the GOP primary; she leads Steve Poizner 47-19 (a 28-pt. lead, quite different from the Field Poll’s 49-point lead last month). Over on the Senate side, Tom Campbell seems to be putting some distance between himself and his competitors; he’s at 31%, with Carly Fiorina at 17 and Chuck DeVore at 14. (No general election matchups were tested.)

• FL-Sen: Although everyone’s sitting and watching, the other shoe still hasn’t dropped yet in Florida. The state GOP is already preparing for the likely independent bid from Charlie Crist, telling its other candidates that they can’t back anybody who isn’t running under the GOP banner. They’ve also rolled out their chief enforcer, Dick Cheney, who endorsed Marco Rubio and who will be inviting Crist-supporting GOPers on hunting trips. Meanwhile, there’s growing speculation that the credit card/fancy-livin’ scandal that’s engulfing the RPOF, and has taken some of the shine off Rubio’s halo, may actually spatter mud as far afield as Crist himself (via for state party chair and key Crist ally Jim Greer). The possibility of a split between two damaged GOPers may be luring a new Democrat to the race, too: billionaire investor Jeff Greene is considering jumping in the primary field (although, considering that every news account about him today seems to be more interested in his relations with Mike Tyson, Heidi Fleiss, and Ron Howard, than with his political chops, I doubt this will be more than a curiosity).

• LA-Sen: While everyone’s still waiting to see if right-wing gadfly James Cain shows up to challenge David Vitter, another lesser-known member of the teabagging set has confirmed that he’s going to run as an independent in the Senate race. Mike Spears, owner of a web design firm, apparently doesn’t have self-funding capacity. He offers up a 5-point plan for “restoring the America he knew growing up,” point 1 of which is the rather ominous, if weird-sounding, “neutralizing party strongholds.”

• PA-Sen: Joe Biden is making his first trip back to Scranton since his election, to stump for Arlen Specter. Fellow members of the local political establishment Bob Casey, Paul Kanjorski, and Chris Carney will be at the event too.

• WA-Sen: Here’s some more food for thought for Dino Rossi, who may still be contemplating a Senate bid (and it seems to be what Tommy Thompson and George Pataki already seemed to understand). No one* in the last decade has launched a Senate bid this late in the game and gone on to win (* = Frank Lautenberg won under unusual circumstances as a last minute fill-in for Bob Torricelli). The closest anyone has come is Mark Dayton, who won in 2000 despite announcing on April 3. The majority of successful non-incumbents ran for more than one year. And prominent members of the state GOP are starting to see the handwriting on the wall, too: state House minority leader Richard DeBolt got tired of waiting and endorsed state Sen. Don Benton in the race instead.

• KS-Gov: This isn’t the right time for Sam Brownback’s approvals to go negative for the first time in years; he’s at 41/47 according to SurveyUSA. Brownback, of course, is looking to make the leap to Governor, facing Democratic state Sen. Tom Holland. Fellow Senator Pat Roberts — less of social values warrior and more of an uncontroversial Main Street type — fares much better at 51/38.

• MN-Gov: Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak picked up a couple more endorsements, starting with Rep. Betty McCollum (who represents mostly St. Paul, rather than Minneapolis). McCollum had previously backed Steve Kelley, who dropped out several months ago. And while the SEIU won’t be endorsing, its state president, Javier Morillo-Alicea, individually weighed in on Rybak’s behalf.

• OR-Gov: Blue Oregon has a rundown on the money chase in the Oregon gubernatorial race. GOPer and ex-NBAer Chris Dudley has been raising the most, but also spending the most: raising $1.3 million over the course of the race, but with $276K CoH. Democrat John Kitzhaber has raised $1.2 million, but is sitting on $575K. Everyone else is down in the five digits.

• MO-08: Tommy Sowers has been attracting a lot of attention this week with his second straight quarter of outraising Jo Ann Emerson, but she retaliated with an internal poll showing that Sowers has a long way to go toward knocking her off in this R+15 district. According to pollster American Viewpoint, she leads 71-18.

• NY-23: More evidence that the institutional might is pushing away from 2009 spoiler Doug Hoffman and toward investment banker Matt Doheny instead, for the GOP nomination. Hoffman’s fundraising numbers for Q1 were weak: he took in $14K in outside contributions, and loaned himself $100K. He’s sitting on $263K CoH, but also $205K in debt.

• NY-29: We Ask America has been trying to break into the polling game lately, although we gotta wonder what’s up with their love of significant digits. Are they that sure about their results? They polled the 29th, finding that, if the special election were held today, GOP Corning mayor Tom Reed would beat currently-little-known Democratic candidate Matthew Zeller 41.38%-24.01%. A majority also support having a special election, rather than waiting till November to fill the seat.

• SD-AL: The first candidate to hit the TV airwaves in the GOP primary in South Dakota isn’t the well-known one (SoS Chris Nelson) or the one with money (Blake Curd), but, well, the other one. State Rep. Kristi Noem is up with an introductory spot.

• VA-02: This may seem way, way down in the weeds, but it could help Glenn Nye out a lot, considering that he has the most Navy-centric district in the nation. The main fight of Nye’s short political career has been to keep the Navy from moving one of its carrier groups from Norfolk to Jacksonville; while he lost the first skirmish on that, the Navy now says the move won’t happen until 2019, sparing his district any immediate economic pain.

• CA-LG: The Democrats in the California state Assembly somehow wised up and, reversing their previous decision, decided to confirm moderate Republican state Sen. Abel Maldonado to the vacant Lt. Governor position. With the 51-17 vote, that means that Maldonado will be opening up the Democratic-leaning SD-15 on the central coast, which will be filled by special election (and has the potential to get the Dems one step closer to the magic 2/3s mark in the state Senate).

• WA-Init: In the wake of Oregon voters approving a high-income surtax, it looks like Washington may follow their lead. Proposed Initiative 1077 would create an income tax (Washington currently has none) on individuals making more than $200K, and in exchange lower property taxes and eliminate the nettlesome B&O tax. SurveyUSA polled the topic and found an almost astonishingly high level of support: 66 are in favor, 27 against. More evidence that new taxes, when properly framed, can be a winner at the ballot box.

• RNC: The RNC is subtly getting involved in the HI-01 special election, transferring $90K to the state party in March that went toward a TV spot for Charles Djou. The bigger story about the RNC today, though, may be about the financial disarray in its house: it’s spending more money courting top-dollar donors that it actually gets back from them.

• WATN?: After weighing a variety of different possible candidacies (state CFO? FL-25?), we’re glad to see 2008 FL-18 candidate Annette Taddeo taking another stab at elective office, as we need to expand our Hispanic bench in the bluening Miami area. She’s running for a seat on the Miami-Dade County Council.