Tag: Meg Whitman

SurveyUSA for KABC, KFSN, KGTV, and KPIX (6/3-6, likely voters, 5/21-23 in parens):

Carly Fiorina (R): 48 (46)

Tom Campbell (R): 22 (23)

Chuck DeVore (R): 16 (14)

Other: 4 (6)

Undecided: 9 (11)

Meg Whitman (R): 59 (54)

Steve Poizner (R): 30 (27)

Other: 6 (10)

Undecided: 5 (9)

(MoE: ±4.1%)

SurveyUSA is seeing what pretty much everyone else is seeing, that Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina have their respective GOP primaries nailed down. Their numbers haven’t changed much at all over the last couple weeks, but remember that when the previous SurveyUSA poll came out, the numbers seemed rather dramatic: there had been a major tightening between Whitman and Steve Poizner in early May (which then quickly dissipated), and they were one of the first to give a substantial lead to Fiorina instead of Tom Campbell. Looks like they did a good job of honing in on the ultimate trends.

Below the two marquee races, there’s also a treasure trove of interesting information in the rest of the SurveyUSA data (some of which was in a separate release, here). And, no, I’m not counting the Democratic gubernatorial primary as “interesting” (where Jerry Brown leads Richard Aguirre 73-4). In the Democratic race to be Jerry Brown’s #2, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom is in pole position; he leads LA city councilor Janice Hahn 43-27. Abel Maldonado, the incumbent GOP Lt. Governor, is in the lead despite teabagger discontent over his various apostasies; he leads conservative ex-state Sen. Sam Aanestad 26-16, with another 26 scattered among various others.

In the AG’s race, the leading Democratic contender is San Francisco DA Kamala Harris, although she has only a narrow lead over Facebook attorney Chris Kelly and former LA City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo; her lead is 26-20-16, with Pedro Nava at 8, Ted Lieu and Alberto Torrico at 6, and Mike Schmier at 2. On the GOP side, Los Angeles County DA Steve Cooley is in the lead at 30, followed by state Sen. Tom Harman at 25 and former law school dean John Eastman at 19.

And SurveyUSA has poll results on all those delightful initiatives in which the corporations and their paid signature gatherers people get to exert direct democracy. Proposition 13 is, like its 70s namesake, designed to limit property taxes, although here it just prevents reassessment after buildings’ values go up after earthquake retrofitting. “Yes” is leading, 49-26. Proposition 14 is maybe the most attention-getting one, as it’s a proposal to switch to a Washington-style top-two primary system; apparently people like that idea, as “Yes” leads 50-28 (I know lots of people are up in arms about that, but speaking as a Washingtonian, the change has had little practical effect other than rendering third parties even more irrelevant than before).

Proposition 15 is a proposal to introduce public funding of political campaigns (although it’s baby steps, starting only with the next SoS race); despite the baby steps, it seems unlikely to pass, with “No” leading 46-29. Proposition 16, which would require an onerous 2/3rds majority before local governments could use public funding to expand electricity service (and which is the subject of huge amounts of money poured in by the state’s utilities), is the closest-looking race, with “No” currently leading 45-41. And finally, Proposition 17 allows insurance companies to base prices on a driver’s insurance coverage history; “Yes” leads 43-39. Hooray for insurance companies!

• AR-Sen: The Bill Halter campaign is looking for last minute phonebanking help to seal the deal. And you can do it from the comfort of your own home.

• CA-Sen, CA-Gov (pdf): The Senate GOP primary portion of the Field Poll came out over the weekend, and it’s right in line with the various other pollsters finding a last-minute Carly Fiorina surge into a double-digit lead. She leads Tom Campbell and Chuck DeVore 37-22-19. (Campbell led 28-22-9 in the previous Field poll in March.) Also, it looks like Campbell’s last-minute ad pitch, centered around his electability, may fall on deaf ears: 42% of primary voters think that Fiorina has the best chance of beating Barbara Boxer, while 22% think that Campbell does (and 12% think that Chuck DeVore does — which is also about the same percentage of Californians who believe there is a 1,000 foot high pyramid in Greenland). There are also primary polls out from Republican pollster Magellan (who don’t have a horse in this race), who find things even worse for Campbell: they have Fiorina leading Campbell and DeVore 54-19-16. They also give a big edge to fellow rich person Meg Whitman in the gubernatorial race; she leads Steve Poizner 64-22. The unfortunate moral of the story here: have a lot of money.

• DE-Sen: New Castle Co. Exec Chris Coons is pre-emptively getting ahead of Republican charges that he raised taxes, by, instead of hiding under the bed like conventional wisdom dictates, saying ‘guilty as charged’ and explaining how it helped. The county wound up with a AAA bond rating and a eight-digit surplus. Coons also previewed one of his lines of attack against Mike Castle: Castle’s role in deregulating the banking sector.

• FL-Sen: As Charlie Crist rebuilds his team from scratch, he’s rolling out a new media team that’s heavy on the Democratic ties. Most prominently, Chuck Schumer’s former chief of staff, Josh Isay, will be Crist’s lead media person. Isay’s firm SKD Knickerbocker may be best-known for helping out other moderate independents, like Joe Lieberman and Michael Bloomberg. One of the fires that Isay will have to put out as soon as he gets in the building, though, is what to do about the Jim Greer situation. Greer’s lawyer is saying that Crist gave the initial OK on Greer’s fundraising workaround which avoided usual party channels (which Greer allegedly turned into a scheme for filling his own pockets).

• IL-Sen: Rep. Mark Kirk’s very, very bad week last week just seems to be spilling over into this week. There are allegations popping up that he fibbed on getting shot at in Afghanistan too, and also evidence that he made a lot of stuff up while talking off the cuff about the Somalia situation last year. Taking a page from Richard Blumenthal, late last week he finally dropped the playing offense against the charges and instead went to the Chicago Tribune’s e-board to say “I’m sorry” — but that apology comes after letting the story fester all week.

• NH-Sen: After a year and a half of having the Democratic primary to himself, there are hints that Rep. Paul Hodes might get some late-in-the-game company. Mark Connolly, the former head of the state’s Securities Division who resigned to become a whistleblower in the wake of the Financial Resources Mortgage coverup (the same one that’ll have Kelly Ayotte testifying before the state legislature soon), expressed some interest and said “he’s angry enough to do it.” (Looks like a common theme this year.) Speaking of Ayotte, it sounds like she doesn’t know how to read a poll: she says she won’t take drilling for oil off New Hampshire’s tiny coastline “off the table.”

• WA-Sen: You might remember from last week that the Univ. of Washington engaged in some methodologically weird stuff by adding an extra week’s worth of samples on the end of their already-released poll and re-releasing the numbers (which were nevertheless unchanged, at Patty Murray 44, Dino Rossi 40). Well, now they’re re-releasing the poll yet again with even more samples, with changed toplines and with specific numbers for that tiny extra sample for the days May 24-28 (following Rossi’s official announcement). The number that’s getting all the press is that Rossi led Murray 42-39 in that batch, although that’s only based on 221 likely voters with a margin of error of 6.6%, so its usefulness is, well, questionable. Their full numbers are now 42-40 for Murray for the entire RV sample and 46-40 for Murray for the entire LV sample (i.e. those who voted in 2006), and she leads Generic R 44-39 among RVs (and 46-41 in the May 24-28 sample), but this poll has gotten so methodologically convoluted I’m not really sure it’s worth much of anything at this point.

Murray got some good news today in the form of an endorsement, and it’s not from a human but a corporation: Boeing. While she’s received plenty of Boeing money in the past, I’m not aware of Boeing ever having explicitly endorsed her or anyone else before (although anyone with a pulse knows that Murray has taken over for Scoop Jackson as the “Senator from Boeing”). Frankly, in the state of Washington, this is a bigger endorsement than any human politician’s endorsement would be, considering the way Boeing’s tendrils reach so much of the state. Finally, the field of miscellaneous Republicans kept shrinking today, as chiropractor Sean Salazar (probably the first guy to try to grab the teabagger mantle here, although he got shoved over by Clint Didier) bailed out of the race and backed Rossi.

• WI-Sen: Here’s a strange vulnerability for Ron Johnson in the Wisconsin Senate race: his fixation on opposing bipartisan Wisconsin state legislation making it easier for victims of childhood sexual abuse to sue their abusers. That’ll require some explanation, and I assume it’ll be something other than his current explanation, that such legislation would only lead to more victims of sexual abuse by making organizations likelier to sweep it under the carpet.

• IA-Gov: After endorsing a variety of misspelled odds-and-ends last week (“Cecil Bledsoe,” “Angela McGowen,” and Joe Miller), Sarah Palin went with a big gun this weekend, and it was one who doesn’t match her carefully cultivated teabagging/religious right image at all: establishment retread Terry Branstad in Iowa. Is she counting on getting repaid by Branstad in the 2012 caucuses, if she decides to give up the grifting lifestyle and take the huge pay cut associated with running for President? (Branstad also has the backing of Mitt Romney, who seems more of a kindred spirit for him.)

• MI-Gov: The Schwarz is not with us after all. Joe Schwarz, the moderate ex-Rep. who got bounced from MI-07 in 2006 in the GOP primary by Tim Walberg, has decided against pursuing the independent bid in the Governor’s race that he’d been threatening. On the surface, the loss of a center-right indie looks like bad news for the Dems, but depending on which two candidates match up in November, Schwarz could just have easily pulled more left-of-center votes… and in all likelihood, he wasn’t going to rack up more than a few percent anyway.

• NY-Gov: In their standoff with Democratic nominee Andrew Cuomo, the Working Families Party seems to have blinked first. They went ahead and nominated placeholders in the Governor, Lt. Gov, and AG slots, presumably to allow coordination with the Dem choices later. Cuomo had been leaning hard on the WFP to do so. The person most affected by this is state Sen. Eric Schneiderman, a Cuomo foe who had been considered the most likely WFP candidate for AG; instead, the WFP may wind up going with Nassau Co. DA Kathleen Rice, who’s Cuomo’s preferred AG for his informal “ticket.”

• TX-Gov: The Greens are actually going to be on the ballot in Texas this year, for the gubernatorial race? I’m as surprised as you are, but it’s less surprising when you find out who’s behind it: Arizona Republican consultant Tim Mooney, who set up the petition drive to get them on the ballot (and who’s also a veteran of the 2004 efforts to get Ralph Nader on as many states’ ballots as possible). GOP incumbent Rick Perry faces a tough race from Dem former Houston mayor Bill White, and he can have a little breathing room if the Greens siphon off a few lefties.

• AR-01: Chad Causey has an interesting argument for Democratic runoff voters in the 1st not to vote for ex-state Sen. Tim Wooldridge: he’s likely to bolt for the Republican Party at his earliest convenience. Causey’s evidence for the flight risk posed by Wooldridge includes his very conservative voting record in the state legislature, starting with his pro-public hanging legislation. Wooldridge, for his part, said he’d never switch. The Wooldridge camp is also offering up an internal poll (no word on the pollster) claiming a 48-24 lead over Causey in the runoff.

• CA-19: SurveyUSA has one last poll of the race in the 19th’s GOP primary, which they’ve polled exhaustively (and found almost exactly the same thing each time). However, this time it’s a little more interesting: there seems to be some late movement to former Fresno mayor Jim Patterson, who now leads state Sen. Jeff Denham 34-30. Ex-Rep. Richard Pombo is back at 17, with Larry Westerlund at 8. On the Dem side, it’s a 26-26 tie between Loraine Goodwin and Les Marsden.

• MN-06: What started out as a thorny three-way primary (when Elwyn Tinklenberg was in the race) has turned into a walk for Democratic state Sen. Tarryl Clark. Maureen Reed, a physician and former Independence Party Lt. Gov. candidate, ended her bid and endorsed Clark against Rep. Michele Bachmann. Reed had done surprisingly well at fundraising, but didn’t have the institutional advantages that Clark did, especially once Clark got the DFL endorsement. Clark still has an uphill fight against Bachmann, who’s insulated against likely future foot-in-mouth incidents by the district’s reddish lean as well as a huge war chest.

• TN-08: A Hill piece on the possibility of another NRCC-touted candidate (in the form of Stephen Fincher) going down in flames actually has some nice dirt on all three Republicans contesting the primary in the 8th. Fincher, of course, is widely noted for his hypocrisy on attacking the federal government while receiving millions in farm subsidies, but it’s also been revealed that he has voted in three Democratic primaries in the last eight years, “used virtually the same TV ad as a candidate for Alabama Agriculture Commisioner” (I have to assume it was an ad from one of the “thugs,” since if he’d riiiiiiipped off Dale Peterson’s ad, the whole blogosphere would already know about it by now), and perhaps most pathetically, misspelled “Tennessee” in a mailer. His challengers, Ron Kirkland and George Flinn, have their own troubles; Kirkland contributed to outgoing Democratic Rep. John Tanner in 2000 and 2004, while Flinn tried to cover up a lawsuit by a contractor who wasn’t paid for remodeling work.

• AR-Sen: I don’t know if this is outright shenanigans or innocent bureaucratic bungling, but a lot of eyebrows are being raised over a strange turn of events in Garland County that’s going to lead to long lines and voters avoiding the polls. The county, with a population of 80,000 and 42 precincts, will have a total of two polling places for the upcoming runoff election. Worth noting: Garland County (home of Hot Springs) is the most populous county in Arkansas that went for Bill Halter in the primary.

• IL-Sen: The Mark Kirk story seems like it’s finally catching hold in the Chicago market. At the link, you can check out the whole “misremembered it wrong” story splashed across the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times, and watch a withering WGN news story.

• WA-Sen: Dino Rossi has reported $600K in contributions in one week since announcing his bid. Anyone who is surprised by this number should get better acquainted with the term “low hanging fruit;” the interesting numbers will be the ones in future weeks to see how he does now that most of Washington’s major real estate and contracting players have, assumedly, maxed out. Also in the not-surprising file, state Sen. Don Benton dropped out of the race and endorsed Rossi. Benton was the more or less GOP frontrunner prior to Rossi’s entry, but also something of a Republican-establishment stand-in for Rossi with a lot of overlap in supporters, so there wasn’t much incentive for him to continue. Goldy correctly yawns at Benton’s departure, saying that Clint Didier (the Palin-endorsed teabagger in the race) was always the real speed bump for Rossi and one that’ll continue to pose a problem: he can’t run away from Didier and his supporters, whose enthusiasm he’ll need in November, but if he gets too close to them, he’ll lose whatever moderate image he once had, which he’ll also need in November.

• CA-Gov (pdf): The last pre-primary Field Poll, or at least part of it, is out. All that they’ve released today is the Republican gubernatorial primary numbers, which are very much in line with everyone else’s numbers lately. They see Meg Whitman leading Steve Poizner 51-25, only half the 49-point lead she had in the last Field Poll in March but still certainly enough to get the job done for her on Tuesday. Keep your eyes peeled for the rest of the data.

• NY-Gov: Maggie Haberman has an interesting retrospective of the big bag of Fail that was the Steve Levy campaign. She weaves together a number of threads that didn’t really make it into the national media — unwillingness to fully commit to the race, his reluctance to dip into his war chest, tabloid stories about law school friends — to paint a picture of a campaign that, in hindsight, was doomed from the outset.

• AR-03: Sarah Palin (and the Susan B. Anthony List) weighed in in AR-03, adding one more “Mama Grizzly” to her trophy room. She endorsed state Sen. Cecile Bledsoe, who’s in a runoff against Rogers mayor Steve Womack for the GOP nomination in the open seat race in this safely-red district. Bledsoe only compiled about 15% of the vote in the primary, although with a huge number of candidates, that was enough to squeak by into second place.

• NY-15: In case there was any doubt that a combination of age, sliminess, and having lost his Ways and Means gavel might prompt a last-minute retirement for Charles Rangel, they were laid to rest. He’ll be officially kicking off his next campaign this weekend.

• OH-18: The long-unresolved GOP primary in the 18th appears to be finally over, as former state Agriculture director and 2008 nominee Fred Dailey conceded. He lost to establishment pick state Sen. Bob Gibbs by 156 votes according to certified results, and the automatic recount only changed two votes. While this is one more in a string of recent GOP primaries where the establishment candidate beat the teabagger, this, like many of those races (like, say, IN-08 and IN-09, and IN-03 and IN-05 if you want to call the woeful Souder and Burton “establishment”) where the anti-establishment candidate came within a hair of winning, and where if there had been fewer teabagger candidates spoiling the broth or things that just bounced slightly differently, the media would be talking about an entirely different narrative.

• Media: So, speaking of media narratives, I’m wondering if the media are starting to dial down their “Dems are dooooomed!” narrative that’s been conventional wisdom for the last half a year. Not just because they may be noticing that the polling evidence for that is sketchy at best, but also, as this Newsweek piece points out, that they may have gotten suckered by the Democrats themselves, who seem to be engaged in the ages-old practices of expectations management, lowballing their predictions so they look like heroes later.

• Ideology: 538 has some fascinating charts up as part of a new post on where states (and where the two parties within each state) fit on the liberal/conservative scale, looking at it on multiple dimensions instead of on a left/right line. West Virginia (socially conservative and economically liberal) stands out as an interesting outlier on the chart, which does a lot to explain its particular brand of politics.

• CA-Sen, CA-Gov: There’s one more poll in California, courtesy of Capitol Weekly (done for them by Republican pollster Probolsky Research). They’ve polled a few times before, but they’re calling this a “tracking poll,” suggesting they’ll be putting out more numbers as we count down to the June 8 primary. At any rate, there aren’t any surprises here: they too see the Carly Fiorina surge on the Senate side: she’s at 40, compared with Tom Campbell’s 25 and Chuck DeVore’s 13. In the Governor’s race, Meg Whitman leads Steve Poizner 54-24.

The big news here, though, is that Campbell, after saying he was going dark earlier this week, apparently pulled together enough last-minute contributions for a final TV ad. His closing argument is all about electability, centering around the recent LA Times/USC poll that gave him a lead over Barbara Boxer while Fiorina trailed. A candidate making a calm, logical pitch based on quantifiable data, instead of throwing together a mish-mash of fearmongering, jingoism, and meaningless buzzwords? I think Campbell might be running in the wrong party’s primary for that kind of thing to work. Fiorina, for her part, may have some backtracking to do after her deriding Boxer’s push on climate legislation as worrying about “the weather.” Back in October, before Campbell’s entry forced herself to recast herself as a conservative, she had lots of praise for cap and trade.

• KY-Sen: Rush disses Rand Paul! No, it’s not Rush Limbaugh; it’s just plain Rush, the pioneer 70s Canadian prog-rockers. They’ve told Paul to stop using Rush’s music at his rallies and in his web ads, citing copyright violations inasmuch as Paul has simply chosen his own Free Will and not asked them for, y’know, permission. The Paul campaign has used “The Spirit of Radio” pre-rallies (and here’s how big a Rush geek he is: he’s actually quoted that song’s lyrics on the stump). There’s always been a lot of overlap between Rush fans and libertarians, not just because many of Rush’s lyrics lean that way, but also because they both have a core audience of 14-year-old boys.

• NY-Sen-B: The Senate primary, for the right to go against Kirsten Gillibrand, is turning out to be just as much of a clusterf@ck as everything else the NY GOP has done lately. The GOP convention has left them with yet one more contested primary, as Bruce Blakeman and David Malpass split the vote (a weighted 42% for Blakeman and 40% for Malpass), leaving them to fight it out in a primary. They’re still likely to be joined by Joe DioGuardi, who only got 18% (missing the 25% threshold) but who intends to petition his way on to the ballot. Remember that DioGuardi is already on the ballot on the Conservative line, though, so he’s participating in November regardless of whether he gets into, let alone wins, the primary.

• CT-Gov: Here’s one advantage to running against a rich guy in a state with public campaign financing: every time your opponent pulls out more money, more money magically appears for you, too. Dan Malloy has raised $250K in contributions, which opens the door to another $1.25 million from the state, and on top of that, he’s entitled to a $938K bonus to match Ned Lamont’s spending. On the GOP side, Michael Fedele (with a rich guy problem of his own, in the form of Tom Foley) would like to do the same thing, but doesn’t look like he can rustle up $250K in contributions by the deadline.

• AL-05: Parker Griffith apparently isn’t switching back to being a Dem after his party-switching chicanery blew up in his face; he congratulated Mo Brooks at a press conference yesterday and said he’ll vote for him in November. “I was rejected by the constituents, they did not accept me. I appreciate that because that is how America is supposed to work,” said Griffith.

• CA-36: There are some internal polls floating around out there ahead of next week’s primary in the 36th. Jane Harman’s camp has a poll out giving her a 58-17 lead over Marcy Winograd (no word on the pollster, let alone any of the details). Winograd has her own internal, with even less detail: all they’re saying is that Harman is down at 43, although their silence about Winograd’s own number is pretty telling.

• FL-19: The FEC is telling ex-Rep. Robert Wexler to give back an unspecified amount of the contributions he received for the 2010 general election — which makes sense, considering he isn’t a participant. (He left to become president of the Center for Middle East Peace, although ongoing chatter has him on track to become the next Ambassador to Israel.) Unfortunately, that means less cash that he can offload to the> DCCC or other Dems this cycle.

• HI-01: I wasn’t aware that he hadn’t already weighed in in favor of Colleen Hanabusa, since most of the rest of the local old-guard Dem establishment had, but today ex-Rep. and gubernatorial candidate Neil Abercrombie endorsed Hanabusa. He also gave a hat tip to Ed Case for getting out of the way.

• Blogosphere: The New York Times actually got something right! They’re going to be partnering with Nate Silver, bringing a relaunched 538 under the NYT’s online umbrella in August. We’re glad to see that the legacy media are realizing that not only is there serious political journalism (if not scholarship) going on in the blogosphere, but that their last gasp at relevance may be by moving in that direction. Congrats to Nate, too!

• CT-Sen: Where’s the New York Times when you need them? At least we have the Post to go there: way back when she was applying for an appointed seat on Connecticut’s Board of Education, one of Linda McMahon’s selling points was that she had a degree in education. Nope, it quickly was revealed that her degree was in Freedom French (which, to my mind, is a lot harder to parse away through semantic obfuscation than “in Vietnam” — I mean, this is just a flat-out lie). Jodi Rell still picked McMahon for the board.

• IL-Sen: Where’s the New York Times when you need them, Part II? Mark Kirk has had to admit that previous claims about his military experience weren’t “precise,” when it turned out that the “Naval Intelligence Officer of the Year” award went to Kirk’s entire unit, not himself as stated on his website’s bio.

• TX-Sen: Remember when gubernatorial candidate Kay Bailey Hutchison promised to resign her Senate seat as soon as she tied up those last few legislative loose ends? After dragging that out to finish her term instead, now she’s making noises about just continuing on like nothing ever happened and running for another full term in 2012. Questions remain as to whether she’d attract high-profile primary competition if she stayed; would-be competitors would have to be heartened by her weak performance in the gubernatorial primary.

• CA-Gov: Meg Whitman pretty much ended her viability as a candidate in the general election with her closing argument ad for the GOP primary, where she demands border crackdowns and opposes “amnesty.” (In fact, check out the photo at Politico’s link; one picture says more than 1000 words could about Pete Wilson handing the Prop 187 turd torch to Whitman. UPDATE: Oops, photo not there anymore, but see here.) To make sure the message gets across to those least likely to be enthused about that, the California Nurses Association is running a Spanish-language ad on Hispanic radio stations that replays her comments.

• MI-Gov: This endorsement isn’t exactly a surprise, seeing as how Andy Dillon is widely disliked by Michigan’s public employee unions, but still it’s an important building block for Virg Bernero. The Michigan Education Association, the state’s largest teacher’s union with 155K members, gave its nod to Lansing mayor Bernero in the Democratic gubernatorial primary; Bernero also has the endorsement of the AFL-CIO, which includes the UAW.

• NY-Gov: Has anyone ever had to confirm to the media that “no, I’m not dropping out,” and then actually gone on to win a race? Steve Levy seems intent on being the first to try to do that. With the mellifluously-named M. Myers Mermel on the verge of getting the backing of the Queens GOP, the GOP/Conservative field is basically collapsing into chaos in the wake of the infighting at the Conservative Party convention, where Levy and Carl Paladino backers forced a placeholder (Ralph Lorigo) onto the Con primary ballot in hopes that Rick Lazio doesn’t win the GOP convention. Paladino’s camp is even talking up the possibility of creating a whole different “Tea Party” ballot line. There’s now also talk of creating a new ballot line out of whole cloth coming from state GOP chair Ed Cox of all places, as a means of helping the GOP’s preferred candidates circumvent the Conservative Party’s preferences.

• SD-Gov: Polling the fast-approaching (June 8) GOP gubernatorial primary in South Dakota has, oddly enough, not been a high priority for any pollsters, so money may be our main guide here. Lt. Gov. Dennis Daugaard is the clear winner by that criteria, having raised $1.65 mil over the cycle, more than double the $700K of next-best state Sen. majority leader Dave Knudsen. Interestingly, though, South Dakota is the only non-southern state to use runoffs, and with three other candidates in the running, those two may find themselves facing off again in late June.

• WY-Gov: Our long national nightmare is over: we have a credible Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Wyoming. State party chair Leslie Petersen took one for the team and filed the paperwork to run in the Democratic primary on Aug. 17. The Natrona Co. party chair, R.C. Johnson, had said she’d run if no one else did, so I suppose the state chair running when no one else did is, uh, something of an upgrade from a county chair. The Jackson-based, 69-year-old Petersen (assuming she gets past the several Some Dudes in the Dem primary) will face one of not one but four strong GOPers in November.

• CA-45: Rep. Mary Bono Mack and her opponent, Palm Springs mayor Steve Pougnet, are on the same stage today to celebrate the new Palm Springs Airport control tower. Both were proponents of the construction project and will no doubt try to claim their share of the credit, although Bono Mack has the slight problem of having voted against the stimulus package that paid more than half the costs of the project.

• PA-12: Turnout numbers seem to contradict the GOP’s excuses about how they would have won the special election in the 12th if they hadn’t gotten swamped by a surge in Dem turnout motivated by the Sestak/Specter primary. Turnout in the 12th for the special election was 135K, compared with 203K in the 12th in the 2006 general election.

• WA-03: Here’s a surprise: state Sen. Craig Pridemore, who’d been carrying the liberal flag in the Democratic primary in the open seat race in the 3rd, is prepared to drop out. Pridemore had been lagging on the financial front compared with self-funding establishment choice Denny Heck (who now has the Dem field to himself), but that hadn’t been a deterrent before and it seems like that wasn’t what spurred the dropout. Instead, it was leaked over the weekend that the Washington Education Association was prepared to back Heck, and without the state’s biggest union on his side, Pridemore didn’t have much a route to getting over the top.

• WI-07: It looks like the careful field-clearing for state Sen. Julie Lassa in the Democratic primary in the open seat in the 7th wasn’t entirely successful. She’ll still have to face Joe Reasbeck in the Dem primary. Reasbeck, an author and consultant who doesn’t seem to have held office, seems to be at the Some Dude end of the spectrum, though. He’s announcing his campaign kickoff with a ganja break at Superior’s Richard Bong Museum.

• New Hampshire: SSPers will no doubt enjoy this… a Blue Hampshire blogger has calculated 2004/2008 PVI for each of New Hampshire’s 299 voting wards, not only putting together tables but also a slick map.

• Polltopia: PPP’s latest nugget unearthed from their crosstabs is that Democrats are still holding onto moderates pretty well, contrary to what conventional wisdom has been asserting. Tom Jensen finds that Dems are leading among self-identified moderates in all the key Senate race around the country. (The problem, of course, is that there are more self-identified conservatives than liberals, which accounts for GOP leads in a number of these races.)

• History: Here’s a very interesting bit of history from Arkansas writer John Brummett, looking at the remarkable parallels between the Blanche Lincoln/Bill Halter race, and the long-forgotten 1972 Democratic primary in Arkansas where upstart David Pryor almost knocked off long-serving conservative Democrat John McClellan.

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner/American Viewpoint for the Los Angeles Times and University of Southern California (5/19-26, likely voters for primary, registered voters for general, 3/20-23 in parentheses):

Carly Fiorina (R): 38 (25)

Tom Campbell (R): 23 (29)

Chuck DeVore (R): 16 (9)

(MoE: ±4.5%)

Barbara Boxer (D-inc): 44

Carly Fiorina (R): 38

Barbara Boxer (D-inc): 38

Tom Campbell (R): 45

Barbara Boxer (D-inc): 46

Chuck DeVore (R): 36

(MoE: ±2.6%)

Meg Whitman (R): 53 (60)

Steve Poizner (R): 29 (20)

(MoE: ±4.5%)

Jerry Brown (D): 44 (41)

Meg Whitman (R): 38 (44)

Jerry Brown (D): 45 (53)

Steve Poizner (R): 31 (22)

(MoE: ±2.6%)

Here’s one more poll confirming the last-minute surge for Carly Fiorina in the GOP Senate primary, which seems to have advertising disparities at its root: trailing by 4 in the late March LA Times/USC poll, she’s now up by 15. The previous poll only tested “Generic Republican” in the primary, and today’s results show why that was kind of silly, given the very different candidate profiles: Tom Campbell beats Barbara Boxer while Fiorina loses (I don’t think any other poll has had such a Campbell/Fiorina disparity in the general, though, and PPP went the opposite direction the other week, where Fiorina performed the best against Boxer).

On the gubernatorial side, this poll is remarkably right in line with other recent polls showing Meg Whitman’s big lead in the primary (50-29 Pollster average today) and Jerry Brown’s smaller lead over Whitman in November (46-39 Pollster average today).

PPP (pdf) (5/21-23, registered voters, no trendlines, likely voters in primary):

Jerry Brown (D): 48

Meg Whitman (R): 36

Undecided: 16

Jerry Brown (D): 48

Steve Poizner (R): 32

Undecided: 19

(MoE: ±3.2%)

Meg Whitman (R): 51

Steve Poizner (R): 26

Someone else: 11

Undecided: 12

(MoE: ±4.8%)

It’s starting to look like, after spending close to a combined $100 million of their own money against each other, than Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner have just gone all Angelides/Westly against each other. (Those were the two Democratic primary contenders in the 2006 gubernatorial election, who went so negative for so long against each other that eventual winner Phil Angelides was left radioactive and an easy mark for Arnold Schwarzenegger in the general.) Favorables for Whitman (24/44) and Poizner (19/43) are both truly awful, allowing the not-so-popular-himself Jerry Brown (37/39) to romp over each one in head-to-heads. The main difference in their performance, in PPP’s first poll of the race, is that the more moderate Whitman fares better with indies against Brown than does Poizner. (UPDATE: Sitting still and watching the fight is paying great dividends for Brown: he’s sitting on $20.6 million CoH, and has spent a whopping total of $400K this year.)

PPP (pdf) (5/21-23, registered voters, no trendlines, likely voters in primary):

Barbara Boxer (D): 45

Carly Fiorina (R): 42

Undecided: 13

Barbara Boxer (D): 47

Tom Campbell (R): 40

Undecided: 12

Barbara Boxer (D): 46

Chuck DeVore (R): 40

Undecided: 13

(MoE: ±3.2%)

Carly Fiorina (R): 41

Tom Campbell (R): 21

Chuck DeVore (R): 16

Someone else: 4

Undecided: 18

(MoE: ±4.8%)

The most interesting news here may be the PPP gives further confirmation to the sudden surge in the GOP primary by Carly Fiorina, which didn’t really start showing up until this week. (Check out the Pollster.com regression lines.) Campbell still leads 32-30 among moderates, but there are more conservatives in the sample and Fiorina is up 47-15 among them (with DeVore at 19). In the general, we’re seeing another symptom of Fiorina gaining and Campbell deflating as Fiorina doubled down on ads while Campbell went mostly dark: few polls prior to this one have seen the more conservative Fiorina overperforming Campbell against Barbara Boxer.

A couple other primary polls from Republican sources are in the same general range as PPP. Magellan (pdf) is a GOP pollster but doesn’t have a candidate in the race (they’ve been offering polls in a number of primaries where they aren’t involved, like Kentucky). They find a very similar 44 Fiorina, 21 Campbell, 14 DeVore in the Senate primary, while Meg Whitman is leading Steve Poizner 54-19 in the gubernatorial primary. That’s an even better showing than the internal poll (pdf) from McLaughlin & Assocs that Meg Whitman put out yesterday, that had her leading 53-27. That brief Steve Poizner surge seems to have dissipated, if it ever actually existed and wasn’t just a couple outliers appearing at once.

SurveyUSA (5/21-23, likely and actual voters, 5/6-9 in parens):

Meg Whitman (R): 54 (39)

Steve Poizner (R): 27 (37)

Others (R): 10 (7)

Undecided: 9 (14)

(MoE: ±4%)

This is a pretty dramatic gyration for SurveyUSA here, who previously showed a significant tightening of the GOP gubernatorial race just a couple of weeks ago. Keep in mind that two other very recent polls (from Research 2000 and the Public Policy Institute of California) both showed Whitman up on Poizner by only 10 points or less. Among those voters who have already cast their ballots (17% of the sample), Whitman leads Poizner by 55-32.

Senate numbers:

Tom Campbell (R): 23 (35)

Carly Fiorina (R): 46 (24)

Chuck DeVore (R): 14 (15)

Tim Kalemkarian (R): 4 (3)

Undecided: 11 (23)

(MoE: ±4%)

Again, this dramatically different than every other poll we’ve seen, with R2K giving Campbell a 37-22 edge on Fiorina and PPIC also giving Fiorina an edge on Campbell, but only by 25-23. Either this one is a huge outlier, or SUSA is seeing something pretty dramatic that other pollsters have missed. Among those who have already voted, SUSA finds that Fiorina holds a 44-30 lead over Campbell.

In other news, Barbara Boxer has announced that her campaign has raised $2 million since the start of April, bringing her cash-on-hand up to $9.6 million.

Research 2000 for Daily Kos (5/17-19, likely voters, 3/8-10 in parentheses):

Meg Whitman (R): 46 (52)

Steve Poizner (R): 36 (19)

Undecided: 18 (29)

(MoE: ±5.0%)

Jerry Brown (D): 46 (45)

Meg Whitman (R): 42 (41)

Undecided: 12 (14)

Jerry Brown (D): 47 (48)

Steve Poizner (R): 37 (33)

Undecided: 16 (19)

(MoE: ±4.0%)

Tom Campbell (R): 37 (33)

Carly Fiorina (R): 22 (24)

Chuck DeVore (R): 14 (7)

Undecided: 27 (36)

(MoE: ±5.0%)

Barbara Boxer (D): 47 (47)

Tom Campbell (R): 40 (43)

Undecided: 13 (10)

Barbara Boxer (D): 48 (49)

Carly Fiorina (R): 39 (40)

Undecided: 13 (11)

Barbara Boxer (D): 47 (49)

Chuck DeVore (R): 38 (39)

Undecided: 13 (12)

(MoE: ±4.0%)

Research 2000’s new poll of California has, on the balance, good news for the Democrats. While Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer aren’t putting up dominant numbers, they’re winning by decent margins (as opposed to the last Field Poll, which had them losing). Also good news: Steve Poizner is gaining on Meg Whitman in the GOP gubernatorial primary, as many other polls have shown; he may not get over the top by June 8, but will certainly leave her bloodied and much poorer. In the Senate primary, Tom Campbell, the toughest GOPer for Boxer to face, is putting a little distance between himself and Carly Fiorina (although the big gainer seems to be Tea Party fave Chuck DeVore, still back in third place).

Public Policy Institute of California (pdf) (5/9-16, likely voters, 3/9-16 (pdf) in parentheses):

Meg Whitman (R): 38 (61)

Steve Poizner (R): 29 (11)

Undecided: 31 (25)

(MoE: ±5.0%)

Jerry Brown (D): 42 (39)

Meg Whitman (R): 37 (44)

Undecided: 21 (17)

Jerry Brown (D): 45 (46)

Steve Poizner (R): 32 (31)

Undecided: 23 (23)

(MoE: ±3.0%)

Carly Fiorina (R): 25 (24)

Tom Campbell (R): 23 (23)

Chuck DeVore (R): 16 (8)

Undecided: 36 (44)

(MoE: ±5.0%)

Barbara Boxer (D): 46 (43)

Tom Campbell (R): 40 (44)

Undecided: 14 (13)

Barbara Boxer (D): 48 (44)

Carly Fiorina (R): 39 (43)

Undecided: 13 (13)

Barbara Boxer (D): 50 (46)

Chuck DeVore (R): 39 (40)

Undecided: 11 (14)

(MoE: ±3.0%)

PPIC was one of a number of pollsters (like Field) showing Jerry Brown momentarily falling behind Meg Whitman a few months ago, when she was dominating the airwaves, which may even have rubbed off on Barbara Boxer; however, they’ve fallen back to giving the edge to Brown (which probably has more to do with Poizner nuking Whitman than anything Brown is doing, which is, as is his way, very little) and to Boxer. Check out the trendlines on the GOP gubernatorial primary here: they also have Poizner within about 10, down from a margin of about 80 million two months ago.

The attention-grabbing number here is in the GOP Senate primary, as they’re pretty much the only pollster to give an edge to Carly Fiorina (who I think most Dems would prefer to see prevail, her self-funding capacity notwithstanding) instead of Tom Campbell.

NV-Sen: Looks like the chicken may have gotten hit by a bus while crossing the road: Sue Lowden is getting ripped for apparently accepting what might be an illegal campaign donation of a luxury RV. Though she says her campaign is leasing it from a supporter, her name appears on the title to the bus. The vehicle costs more than $100,000, so that would sorta exceed the $2,400 FEC limit.

PA-Sen: After campaigning for Creigh Deeds, Jon Corzine, and Martha Coakley, I can understand why Barack Obama suddenly thinks Arlen Specter’s developed a case of the cooties. But even if the president hopes to avoid swirling in some stink lines now, he’s not going to be able to be that choosy in the fall. P.S. How come he never made an appearance in Hawaii? He could have done a joint event for Case & Hanabusa, and the locals would have gone nuts for it.

Meanwhile, this seems remarkably douchey: Joe Sestak said he’s “looking forward” to Arlen Specter’s support after Tuesday, but wouldn’t say whether he’d do the same! I’m not sure how you can be so nakedly hypocritical with a straight face and expect to get away with it.

CA-Gov: Social issues just haven’t seemed to dominate Republican primaries this year, but Steve Poizner seems to be throwing everything he can at Meg Whitman these days. He has a new ad (no word on the size of the buy, natch) attacking Whitman for creating a special porn-only section on eBay. I feel bad for that poor teenager on the laptop feature in the spot. Also, I find it odd that he mentions Whitman “cleaned up” gun sales on eBay in something of a positive light. Shouldn’t that be a bad thing, too?

KS-04: Richard Pompeo, the GOP’s Chosen One to succeed Rep. Todd Tiahrt, is coming under fire for a D.C. fundraiser held by convicted (and later pardoned) Iran-Contra felon Bud McFarlane. John McCain was in attendance, but so were a ton of lobbyists – something Pompeo originally tried to deny. Not a good year to be sucking up to D.C. vampire squids, but Pompeo is well ahead in the money race in his primary.

MA-10: State Rep. Jeff Perry’s record as a police sergeant is coming under scrutiny, for two abusive strip searches of teenage girls conducted by an officer under his command in the early 1990s. The officer, Scott Flanagan, was later convicted of assault, and Perry and the town were sued, with both cases settling. Perry resigned his job six months after the allegations were made public in 1993, but he claims the two were not related.

MI-07: A little dust-up in the GOP primary: A surrogate for ex-Rep. Tim Walberg blasted Brian Rooney for failing to show up at an anti-abortion dinner (sounds lovely, right?) so that he could instead attend a fundraiser at the home of a past president of the “liberal” Republican Main Street Partnership. Rooney says he’s super-duper anti-abortion, yadda yadda, this is divisive, etc. Keep it up, Walberg!

NY-01: Stuck behind Newsday’s paywall is a tantalizing story that suggests GOPer Randy Altschuler is getting blasted by his primary opponents for – get this – his one-time membership in the Green Party. Not exactly a sterling credential for someone hoping to land the Republican nomination.

VA-05: Earlier this month, the GOP 5th CD convention held a straw poll, and teabagger Feda Kidd Morton won with 30%. State Sen. Rob Hurt, who Republican activists really seem to love to hate, was second with 25%. Despite also getting the endorsement of the Family Research Council, Morton has no money, and the field is pretty fractured.

NY-Comptroller: Eliot Spitzer says he won’t make a comeback attempt – at least this year – for comptroller or any other office. Since petition time is almost upon us (and petitioning is very difficult in NY), he can’t really change his mind at this point.