Tag: NY-20

Tonight is the deadline for candidates in the NY-20 special election to file their fundraising reports with the FEC for the period covering January 1st through March 11th. Now that both Democrat Scott Murphy and Republican Jim Tedisco have filed, let’s take a look at their hauls:

All numbers are in thousands, and “CoH” represents remaining cash on hand at the end of the reporting period.

Despite the assumption that Murphy would be able to use his deep pockets to build up a financial edge over Tedisco, Tedisco has dipped into his own family piggy bank in the form of a $200K loan, keeping this race at near financial parity. Of course, the money is still flowing in at a fast clip to both candidates; you can view the 48 Hour FEC notices filed by both Tedisco here and Murphy here (just look for links labeled “Form F6”) for more updates. These sums are also just a portion of the total expenditures in this race — both Dem and GOP-allied organizations are throwing down some serious scrilla here. We’ll take a closer look at these independent expenditures soon.

This is almost to surreal for mere words…

http://www.poststar.com/blogs/…

Republican and Conservative congressional candidate turned down an invitation to participate in the WMHT/Times Union debate on Thursday because he already had his own multi-media event planned, said Adam Kramer, a spokesman.

Tedisco will conduct a “Jim Tedisco in 3-D” campaign forum at 7 p.m. Thursday at his campaign headquarters in Halfmoon, Kramer said.

People will be able to participate in three different ways: in person, via telephone conference call or via the Internet, he said.

Democratic, Independence and Working Families candidate Scott Murphy and Libertarian candidate Eric Sundwall, the same evening, will participate the WMHT/Times Union debate to be televised live on WMHT, WSKG and Mountain Lakes PBS public television stations.

Kramer said the Tedisco and Murphy campaigns had previously agreed to participate in four debates, that did not include the WMHT/Times Union event.

Tedisco had already planned his own event on Thursday when he was invited to the fifth debate, Kramer said.

Kramer called back to emphasize that there are still two other debates prior to the March 31 special election: one on March 24 to be broadcast on WNYT- News Channel 13 and another on March 26 to be broadcast on Time Warner Capital News 9.

There were only three debates for the 2008 presidential campaign, which was spread out over a longer time period than the 20th Congressional District special election race, Kramer said.

• NY-20: As we pass the two-week mark on the special election, Jim Tedisco has a new TV ad out that’s apparently the first salvo in his new decision to run far, far away from those mean national Republicans. Says Tedisco: “Like the president said, we’re not Republicans or Democrats, we’re Americans. And that’s the team I’m on.” So this is what we’ve come to, in just a few short years… a panicked and fearful Republican has to abandon the noble American rhetorical tradition of attack ads, and instead stoop to craven positive messaging?

• PA-Sen: Shortly after publicly spurning attempts by Democratic bigwigs to get him to party-switch, Arlen Specter sends up an interesting trial balloon: he may consider running as an independent in 2010, with the understanding that he would continue to caucus with Republicans. Since Pennsylvania has a sore loser law, he’d have to decide ahead of time to take this route rather than only after losing the GOP primary. The article gives the last word to Joe Lieberman: “I’d be delighted to have him in my caucus.”

• Maps: Pew Research Center has released a really interesting series of maps showing migration patterns between the four census regions of the country. The results shouldn’t be surprising (the most dominant pattern is northeast to south, followed by midwest to south, with the west basically holding steady), but they illustrate what we’re looking at with redistricting in 2010 (and also illustrates why we’re starting to see better results for Dems in the non-Deep parts of the South).

• Media: On a personal note for me, my daily newspaper is dead; long live my daily newspaper. This is the first day with no dead-tree edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in about 150 years, but as you can see, seattlepi.com (with a dramatically reduced staff) just keeps humming right along (which doesn’t really affect me, since I was part of the problem; I only read only it online for free). Time will only tell whether this is the first bold step in reimagining the media business… or one more nail in journalism’s coffin as ‘newspapers’ keep moving toward aggregating other people’s information and not doing the actual work of reporting.

• WI-08: Republican John Gard, who lost two consecutive races to Democrat Steve Kagen, tells a local Fox affiliate that it is “highly unlikely” that he’ll run in 2010. Meanwhile, Door County Board of Supervisors member Mark Savard is in the race, and is already running radio ads. (J)

The shifty bastard finally comes clean:

It’s no longer a hypothetical question.

Assembly Minority Leader Jim Tedisco just came out against the stimulus package passed last month by Congress after having previously saying only that he supported a package with amendments. The question has been used by his Democratic opponent, Scott Murphy, in their race to succeed Kirsten Gillibrand in Congress.

“My position is: yeah, I worked as hard as I could have to get those amendments in and to get them passed. I realize now that people don’t understand that if they didn’t get passed, I would have voted no,” Tedisco said. “I’m going on the record now to say I would have voted no, because what we should have done was go back to the drawing board, get a stimulus package that truly creates jobs, invests in infrastructure and the economy.”

Shorter Tedisco: I would have voted against the actual stimulus so that I could instead vote for a non-existent stimulus. It seems that national Republicans would rather lose this seat than win with a pro-stimulus platform. Wild. I am sure Scott Murphy will eviscerate him for this nonsense.

Following up on James’s post from last night (which gets my vote for funniest diary title of the year), it looks like the NRCC is putting its foot down and not letting Jim Tedisco go rogue. Tedisco has vowed to seize control of his message and run only positive ads in the remaining three weeks… not a bad idea, considering that one of the tidbits buried in the game-changing Siena poll from yesterday was that his negative ads were killing him. The poll found that Tedisco’s ads made 12% of voters more likely to back him, while 28% were less likely.

Not so fast, says the NRCC. They’re professionals, they know exactly what works based on their previous excellent track record, and are just going to keep running negative ads on Tedisco’s behalf, regardless of his ingratitude. According to NRCC spokesperson Ken Spain:

“The NRCC has an obligation to hold Scott Murphy accountable for the past he is trying to hide as a Wall Street executive whose actions represent everything that has gone wrong with our economy. We have no plans to shirk our responsibilities.”

(Cue footage of Tedisco pounding his head on his desk.)

Also today, as part of a somewhat smarter ad campaign, the Scott Murphy campaign rolled out a new ad starring the most popular person in NY-20 according to Siena: Kirsten Gillibrand, who sports a deity-like 78% favorable rating. (The ad doesn’t seem to be YouTubed yet, but you can see it at the Murphy website in the lower right corner.)

Y’know, when this campaign started off, I figured that Democrat Scott Murphy faced long odds in his bid to replace Kirsten Gillibrand in the House. But when your Republican opponent is “shaking up” his campaign three weeks before e-day after being nailed repeatedly in the press for his non-position on the recent stimulus bill, well, that’s a pretty promising sign for Team Blue. From the Glens Falls Post-Star:

Reacting to his Democratic opponent’s surge in the polls, Tedisco said Thursday he’s taking control of the content of his advertising from the National Republican Congressional Committee.

“I’m taking over and we’re going to run a campaign that relates to the people of the 20th Congressional District,” he said.

The first depiction of “the real Jim” will air in a new television commercial set to debut this evening, he said. […]

Tedisco blamed his drop in the poll on an advertising strategy that has focussed heavily on attacking his Democratic opponent.

Tedisco said going forward the content of his ads will be more positive with him making the decisions instead of the national party.

“We’re going to run a 20th District campaign and talk about the positive issues, and leave the rest of the distortions to the other side,” he said.

This reminds me a bit of the Greg Davis apology tour in Northeast Mississippi last fall — only, y’know, in advance of the vote.

The Albany Project has more.

Siena College (3-9/10, likely voters, 2/18-19 in parentheses):

Scott Murphy (D): 41 (34)

Jim Tedisco (R): 45 (46)

Eric Sundwall (L): 1 (n/a)

(MoE: ±3.7%)

Yesterday you may remember that the Scott Murphy camp came out with an internal poll showing a 7-point lead for Jim Tedisco, but I questioned whether the race was actually closer than that, given that the internal poll was more than two weeks old and the intervening weeks involved a lot of hammering on Tedisco for his inability to commit one way or the other to the stimulus package. I may have been on to something: Siena comes out with another poll (so finally we have some trendlines) of NY-20, and Murphy has shaved his previous 12-point deficit to 4.

As you can see from the trendlines, Tedisco is holding steady while Murphy is vacuuming up the undecideds. Tedisco also doesn’t seem to be impressing anyone new: his favorable/unfavorable is 49/30, which looks good on the surface, but two weeks ago he was at 47/20. (Murphy’s favorable/unfavorable is 40/25, up from 29/10, so his ad blitz is at least erasing his #1 problem, lack of name recognition.) The trajectory of the trendlines points to a very close race, and this being a special election, it’s likely to boil down to turnout, enthusiasm, and ground game.

This poll also breaks down the race by region within the district. Tedisco has a big edge in suburban Saratoga County, where he’s ostensibly from (he represents Schenectady in the state assembly, which is outside the district), while Murphy has a big edge in the district’s blue-collar northern counties (Murphy is from Glens Falls). The two are close in the Hudson Valley counties south of Albany, which looks to be the swing area where the real battle will be fought.

As I’m sure you’ve read elsewhere, this race is also turning into a bit of a behind-the-scenes referendum on RNC chairman Michael Steele. While I’m starting to look forward to winning this race, one unfortunate consequence of winning may be the end of the Steele chairmanship… which, at least in terms of driving the media narrative, has so far proven to be a much bigger gift to Democrats than one more seat in the House.

UPDATE: The RNC can read polls, too. They just transferred $100,000 to the New York GOP to buttress Tedisco’s campaign.

Benenson Strategy Group (D) (2-24/25, likely voters):

Scott Murphy (D): 37

Jim Tedisco (R): 44

Eric Sundwall (L): 4

(n = 400)

This is starting to look rather encouraging: never-before-elected venture capitalist Scott Murphy is within 7 points of state assembly minority leader Jim Tedisco in a Democratic internal poll in the race to succeed Kirsten Gillibrand in NY-20. Tedisco led by 21 in early February in his own POS internal and then by 12 in an independent poll in mid-February from Siena, so while there’s an apples and oranges problem here among pollsters, there’s an upward trajectory for Murphy as we approach the Mar. 31 special election.

One other observation: folks in the media are treating this poll as evidence that Tedisco’s hemming and hawing about voting for the economic stimulus package (and the ensuing broadside of criticism he received from the local papers’ editorial boards) hurt him. I’m sure that’s true. But look at the dates this poll was in the field: two and a half weeks ago, before Tedisco’s vacillations really started to define the race, and only a week after that Siena poll. I don’t know why they waited so long to release the poll, but given the age of this poll and intervening events, it’s quite possible that the real race is even closer. (Discussion is underway in conspiracy‘s diary.)

http://www.politico.com/news/s…

Beneson Strategy Group, 2/24-25, 400 LV

Tedisco 44

Murphy 37

Sundwall 4

Dated so it might be even closer now.

“Murphy, in his first run for elected office, has repeatedly attacked Tedisco over the Republican’s initial refusal to say how he would have voted on the stimulus package, which was approved in the House without a single GOP vote. Tedisco eventually said he would have voted for the bill “with amendments.”

But the controversy has allowed Murphy to cut into Tedisco’s once seemingly impregnable lead. Early polls had Tedisco up by 20-plus points, while a Siena Research Institute poll two weeks ago still had him holding a 12-point edge.”

Win this one and Repubs are seriously screwed. Oh and Michael Steele would get the chop.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com…