Tag: MO-09

• AZ-Sen: Maybe she was scared off by that R2K poll that had her down more than 20-odd points? Nan Stockholm Walden, a wealthy attorney and businesswoman who had been the subject of DSCC interest as a candidate in Arizona, decided not to run. That gives Tucson city councilor Rodney Glassman a pretty clear path to the nomination (assuming he runs; he’s still in exploratory mode).

• CT-Sen: Did you know that Linda McMahon actually held (until now) a political position, in addition to, of course, all the important work she does at WWE? She was on Connecticut’s Board of Education (an appointed position, courtesy of Jodi Rell), but just resigned from that role. She says that there are too many restrictions on political activities by board members for her to be able to remain in that position, as she tries to get the GOP Senate nomination.

• SD-Sen: John Thune may have dodged having to run against a Democrat in November, but he won’t be running purely unopposed. He’s still facing off against an independent, perennial candidate Kurt Evans.

• WI-Sen, WI-Gov: I had no idea that St. Norbert was the patron saint of fucked-up polls. A poll from Wisconsin Public Radio/St. Norbert College is tilted even further in the Republican direction than recent offerings from Rasmussen and the decidedly conservative Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. They find Russ Feingold losing to Tommy Thompson 45-33 (with 14% for an independent/third party, whoever that might be), and beating Generic R by only 40-37. Their gubernatorial numbers find Tom Barrett losing to Scott Walker 44-28 and to Mark Neumann 43-29. Even the GOP primary numbers seem screwy, with underdog Neumann almost even with Walker, who leads 24-23.

• CA-Gov: Meg Whitman rummaged around in her purse and found another $20 million to throw on the table, bringing her personal contributions to the race up to a whopping $59 million. Despite her big lead over Steve Poizner in the primary, she may need to prepare to shore things up, as Poizner has been telegraphing that he’s going to start going hard at her on the hot-button issue of immigration, in a last-ditch effort to get the state’s right-wingers to pay some attention to him.

• GA-12: There were some poorly sourced rumors yesterday that Rep. John Barrow — a conservadem in a swing district facing a primary challenge and the ire of a large swath of his African-American constituency after his HCR “no” vote — was going to switch parties. Barrow now says he was never even contemplating that, though.

• KS-03: After the Kansas City Star reported last week that Stephene Moore was going to run to replace her husband, Dennis, in the 3rd, she started acting coy about it (despite insider assurances that it was a done deal). As expected, though, today she made it official, filing a glaring hole in this R+3 open seat.

• LA-03: It looks like the NRCC is finally getting a top-tier participant in the open seat race in the 3rd (despite that winning it won’t be much of a prize, as the 3rd is poised to vaporize in 2012 redistricting). Former state House speaker Hunt Downer says he’ll announce his candidacy very soon. Probably the surest indication that Downer is serious is that state Rep. Nickie Monica, who may have been the strongest GOPer in the field to date, now says he’s getting out of the race to make way for Downer. With attorney Ravi Sangisetty the only Dem willing to stick his neck out for this one, this one’s pretty thoroughly in the GOP column.

• MN-06: State Sen. Tarryl Clark has been putting up some monster fundraising numbers against Michele Bachmann this cycle; I guess that’s what happens when you run against one of the nation’s top lightning rods for teh crazy. She pulled in $505K last quarter, bringing her to $1.1 million in total receipts this cycle. Unfortunately, Clark (or her primary opponent Maureen Reed, who’s also raised well but hasn’t released Q1 numbers yet) will likely have to contend with the presence of spoiler Independence Party candidate Bob Anderson. Anderson pulled in 10% of the vote in 2008 (while Elwyn Tinklenberg lost by only 3%), and he’s seeking the IP’s endorsement again.

• NH-01: RNC committee member Sean Mahoney made a big show out of resigning his post, ostensibly out of disgust with the Michael Steele administration and its free-spending, strip-clubbing ways. Speculation, though, is that Mahoney is planning to run in the GOP primary in the 1st (where Manchester mayor Frank Guinta is considered frontrunner, although so-so fundraising has diminished his luster a bit), which would require him to resign anyway. Mahoney isn’t promising anything on that front yet, though.

• NY-29: The Democrats have literally chosen Some Dude as their standard bearer in the 29th. The party chairs in the eight counties in the district issued a statement where they said they’ve chosen a consensus nominee to replace Eric Massa in the special election that may or may not happen. However, they neglected to actually say who that candidate might be. We’ll know the masked man’s identity next week.

• TN-03: A Huck divided against itself cannot stand? In a prime example of one hand not knowing what the other is doing, HuckPAC (Mike Huckabee’s national financial arm) and Team Huck Tennessee (the local grassroots operation) are endorsing different candidates in the GOP primary in the 3rd. Team Huck is endorsing former state GOP chair Robin Smith, while HuckPAC (and presumably, Huckabee himself) is going with attorney Chuck Fleischmann.

• TN-08: State Sen. Roy Herron had another fine fundraising quarter as he tries to keep this open seat in Democratic hands; he pulled in $490K last quarter, leaving him with more than $1 million cash on hand. It’s not an expensive district, media-wise, but he has some strong fundraising competition from humble gospel-singing farmer agribusiness mogul Stephen Fincher, who pulled in over $300K himself and is sitting on $820K CoH.

• PA-St. Sen.: As if the Pennsylvania legislature couldn’t be held in any lower esteem, here’s another fresh scandal. Luckily, this one seems to be falling on the Republican side of the aisle: state Sen. Jane Orie, the body’s third-ranking GOPer, was just accused by a grand jury of repeatedly using her staff for political campaigns on the state’s dime (include the campaign of her sister, state Supreme Court justice Joan Orie Melvin). Charges are expected, but Orie is shrugging it off, saying it’s a politically motivated smear by Democratic Allegheny Co. DA Stephen Zappala.

• Filings: The filing deadline in Missouri has passed, on March 30. Rep. Roy Blunt wound up with (count ’em) 10 Republican primary opponents in the Senate race, although state Sen. Chuck Purgason seems the only one worth paying attention to. The number of GOPers vying to take on Ike Skelton in MO-04 also reached the double digits. Probably the biggest surprise and disappointment was in MO-09: not that the DCCC would likely have strongly contested this district that they barely lost in 2008 when it was open, but not a single Democrat showed up to run in this race.

• Teabaggers: Here’s a nice catch from Ruy Teixeira: teabagging is about as popular as socialism. In slightly-differently-worded questions from two different 2010 polls, Gallup found that 37% had a favorable opinion of “the Tea Party movement” (including 14% of Democrats), while 36% had a positive image of “socialism” (including 17% of Republicans?!?).

Research 2000 for Daily Kos (10/20-22, likely voters, 9/17-18 in parens):

Judy Baker (D): 42 (40)

Blaine Luetkemeyer (R): 47 (49)

Other: 8 (6)

Undecided: 3 (5)

(MoE: ±5%)

The open seat race in Missouri’s rural R+7 (but historically Democratic) Ninth District is one of those races that probably would have gotten written off most years, but between the size of the Democratic wave this year, a money influx, and good candidate recruitment, we’re in a credible position to pull off the upset here. Internal polls have, in fact, shown Judy Baker up by as much as 4.

Research 2000 finds that Baker is down 5, but the trendlines have improved nicely from last month. The battle here seems mostly over the independents (who make up 30% of the sample); Luetkemeyer leads 44-42 among them. At the presidential level, McCain leads Obama 54-40, a much better showing than 2004 when Bush won 59-41.

Global Strategy Group for the DCCC (10/5-7):

Judy Baker (D): 40

Blaine Luetkemeyer (R): 36

(MoE: ±4.9%)

Two recent polls — one by SurveyUSA in early September and another by Research 2000 in mid-September showed Baker trailing Luetkemeyer by 12 and 9 points, respectively, but that was before the shit really hit the economic fan, and also before the DCCC started hitting the airwaves with ads highlighting Luetkemeyer’s support for Social Security privatization (the bad kind of “SSP”). I’d wait for a few more polls before accepting these numbers as gospel, though.

The Wall Street Journal has an article on Democratic candidates whose faith is potentially an asset in winning over voters in conservative-leaning districts. The article features Judy Baker (MO-09) and Larry Kissell (NC-08).

http://online.wsj.com/article/…

During the primaries Judy Baker was dubbed as “too liberal” to win in the MO-09 and yet I have always felt that her biography and her Baptist faith allow her to connect with voters in the district and taht as many voters vote their identity rather than issues, she is an ideal liberal Democratic candidate for a deep red Bush +18 district like ours.

If you donate to Judy Baker at my webpage below, I’ll match you up to $300.

http://www.actblue.com/page/wa…

General Wesley Clark also has an ActBlue webpage for her:

http://www.actblue.com/page/3f…

Larry Kissell’s donation page is here:

http://www.actblue.com/page/la…

SurveyUSA for Roll Call (9/1-2, likely voters):

Judy Baker (D): 38

Blaine Luetkemeyer (R): 50

(MoE: ±4.0%)

Not exactly thrilling numbers, especially compared to the recent Momentum Analysis internal poll which showed Baker leading by two points in this R+6.5 open seat race. One tidbit leaves me a bit skeptical: McGramps is leading Obama by a 61-36 margin in this district. While I certainly don’t think that Obama will be neck-and-neck with McCain in this district, I would have expected him to be at least running even with John “The Haunted Tree” Kerry’s 2004 performance (he lost this district by 59-41).

I’ll have to wait until SUSA releases the full crosstabs in the morning for further comment, though.

SSP currently rates this race as Lean Republican.

UPDATE: Crosstabs are here. At first glance, nothing strikes me as immediately off.

Jame’s L. noted that Luetkemeyer’s camp had a deranged explosion response to Judy Baker having a small lead in the first general election poll of the MO-09 race.

The Luetkemeyer response is here:

“Judy Baker’s poll is like a NASCAR driver bragging about being ahead after the first lap of this weekend’s Sharpie 500, which in case Judy didn’t know is a car race enjoyed by ‘those people’ often derided by liberal Democrats like herself,” said Luetkemeyer spokesman Paul Sloca in a statement.

Of course the Luetkemeyer camp had egg on their face after swing state project pointed out that Baker cosponsored a bill that would name a stretch of road after local NASCAR racer Carl Edwards:

State Sen. Chuck Graham and state Rep. Judy Baker announced the plans to designate Route WW from Highway 63 to Olivet Road as “Carl Edwards Drive.”

Now to put the final topping on this funny story…the very driver that Judy Baker honored, won the Sharpie 500 that the Luetkemeyer camp was referring too 🙂

http://www.inrich.com/cva/ric/…

Not Judy Baker! She sure loves her some NASCAR:

It’s official: Carl Edwards is Columbia’s native son.

A billboard unveiled this week along eastbound Interstate 70 near Range Line Street brags that Columbia is the home of the 2007 NASCAR Busch Series winner.

About a hundred friends and family yesterday surprised the 28-year-old NASCAR star with a reception, showed off the billboard and also announced plans to rename a stretch of Route WW after Columbia’s biggest celebrity. […]

State Sen. Chuck Graham and state Rep. Judy Baker announced the plans to designate Route WW from Highway 63 to Olivet Road as “Carl Edwards Drive.” (emphasis added)

Which makes this deranged explosion from her opponent’s campaign in response to new poll results showing her leading Republican Blaine Luetkemeyer (which we noted below) look even more psychotic:

“Judy Baker’s poll is like a NASCAR driver bragging about being ahead after the first lap of this weekend’s Sharpie 500, which in case Judy didn’t know is a car race enjoyed by ‘those people’ often derided by liberal Democrats like herself,” said Luetkemeyer spokesman Paul Sloca in a statement.

Nice try. Keep on truckin’, little buddy.

Momentum Analysis for Judy Baker (8/12-14, likely voters):

Judy Baker (D): 41

Blaine Luetkemeyer (R): 39

Tamara Millay (L): 3

Undecided: 16

(MoE: ±4.9%)

Nice numbers for Baker, whose strength among women voters (45-36) and stronger base support (78-12 among Dems, compared to Luetkemeyer’s 66-14 among Republicans) are propelling her to an early lead.

Luetkemeyer also appears to be a bit dinged up after his Club For Growth-tainted primary, as his favorability (33-16) is more mixed than Baker’s (30-8).

It’s a very solid start for Baker, but getting to 50% is the real challenge. SSP currently rates this race as Lean Republican.

(Big hat-tip to Wayne in Missouri for the catch.)

PS: Check out the Luetkemeyer campaign’s psychotic reaction to the poll:

“Judy Baker’s poll is like a NASCAR driver bragging about being ahead after the first lap of this weekend’s Sharpie 500, which in case Judy didn’t know is a car race enjoyed by ‘those people’ often derided by liberal Democrats like herself,” said Luetkemeyer spokesman Paul Sloca in a statement.

“Those people”?? Talk about grasping at straws and then some.

Baker has a 30% favorability to 8% unfavorabilty rating and has higher favorability than unfavorability even among Republican voters (especially Republican women).

Luetkemeyer’s favorability is 33% to 16% unfaovarbility.

This is a District that was Bush +19 in 2004 and that the Republican Hulshof won 61% to 36% in 2006.

The poll was a Baker internal poll conducted by Momentum Analysis. In the primaries Momentum analysis gave Baker a 6 point lead over Gaw in their only internal poll of the primary (she won by 13 in that race).

Full poll story here:

http://blogs.columbiatribune.c…

Donate to Baker at My ActBlue and I’ll match you (the first $400).

http://www.actblue.com/page/wa…

For all the talk of “Red State Missouri”, Democrats did not do too shabbily when it came time to turn out and vote in the key state and congressional primaries last night.

First, if you look at the vote for governor Republican voting in a hotly contested party primary, only outperformed Jay Nixon and a minor opponent by 38,081 votes. In the Republican leaning MO-09 where both parties had contested primaries, Republicans outperformed Democrats by 3,312 votes.

The most important result, in my opinion, came out of the MO-06 where, with only 84% of the Democratic vote reporting, was running ahead of Sam Graves by 578 votes. Does primary turnout necessarily predict general election results? Not always. But it is a good measure of enthusiasm of party voters and, and when you take into account a number of factors, it looks like it is on our side.