Tag: Jane Norton

• CA-Sen: Russian law enforcement officers raided Hewlett-Packard’s Moscow offices today, as part of an investigation into whether HP paid millions in bribes to the Russian government to win a large contract. Why are we leading with this story today? Guess who was CEO of HP in 2003, when the contract was executed? That’s right… Carly Fiorina.

• CO-Sen: Ken Buck, the right-wing Weld County DA who’s become a fave of the teabagger set (to the extent that establishment GOPer Jane Norton isn’t even looking to compete at the activist-dominated state assembly), just received the endorsement of hard-right starmaker Jim DeMint. (Buck’s last quarter wasn’t that impressive, though: $219K raised, $417K CoH.)

• CT-Sen: Here’s an indication of the savvy investment skills that got Linda McMahon to the top. She revealed that she self-financed another $8 million this quarter, bringing her total self-funding all cycle to $14 million. (She also raised $37K from others.) What was the return on her gigantic investment? Now she’s down a mere 25-or-so points to a guy who speaks in 10-minute-long run-on sentences. Meanwhile, ex-Rep. Rob Simmons, who has to rely on the kindness of strangers instead, has seen his fundraising get drier in a post-Chris Dodd environment; he raised only $550K last quarter.

• IN-Sen: Here’s a big fat fundraising fail, although it may explain why he didn’t see any shame in missing the reporting deadline. Republican ex-Sen. Dan Coats’ comeback bid managed to pull in a whopping $379K last quarter. (He has $331K CoH.)

• MO-Sen: Roy Blunt is doubling down on the stingy: he reiterated his desire to repeal HCR, even the part about making sure that people with preexisting conditions are able to get coverage. He also lost another skirmish in the perception battle today, as Robin Carnahan narrowly outraised him for the first quarter, $1.5 million to $1.3 million.

• NH-Sen, NH-01: In the New Hampshire Senate race, Kelly Ayotte and Paul Hodes are pretty closely matched fundraising-wise: she raised $671K in Q1 with $1.3 million CoH, while he raised $665K with $1.7 million CoH. Ayotte’s GOP primary opponent, William Binnie, raised $400K from donors even though he’s mostly focused on self-funding; he’s sitting on $1.7 million CoH, despite having been advertising constantly. In the 1st, Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, never much of a fundraiser, had a so-so quarter; she raised $168K and sits on $485K.

• NV-Sen: Although she’s been dwindling in the polls, don’t quite count out former Assemblywoman Sharron Angle yet. The Tea Party Express endorsed the one-time Club for Growth favorite in the GOP Senate primary.

• PA-Sen: Arlen Specter continues to be the cash king in the Pennsylvania Senate race, now sitting on a $9 million warchest, but he was substantially outraised by Pat Toomey in the last quarter. Specter raised $1.1 million in the first quarter, half of Toomey’s haul.

• GA-Gov, GA-Sen: It’s strange we’ve been dropping the ball on mentioning this poll for almost a week now, as it’s good news for Democrats. Research 2000 polled the general election in the Georgia gubernatorial race, and found ex-Gov. Roy Barnes narrowly ahead in all three configurations. He leads expected GOP nominee Insurance Comm. John Oxendine, 45-42, ex-Rep. Nathan Deal 44-42, and ex-SoS Karen Handel 44-43. AG Thurbert Baker, if he somehow gets the Dem nod, loses 48-36 to Oxendine, 48-35 to Deal, and 49-35 to Handel. Over in the Senate race, GOP incumbent Johnny Isakson looks pretty safe: he beats Baker 50-34 and Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond 53-26 (not that either one is planning to run).

• ME-Gov: Good news for Dems turned into bad over the course of a few days; social conservative Michael Heath (former head of the Maine Family Policy Council) launched an independent bid earlier this week (which would only serve to hurt the GOP), then did an about face and pulled the plug on it today. There’s already one prominent indie candidate in the race, environmental lawyer Eliot Cutler, who seems poised to draw more from Dems than the GOP.

• OR-Gov: Here’s a camera-ready moment from last night’s debate between Democratic party candidates John Kitzhaber and Bill Bradbury at the University of Oregon. In response to calls of “is there a doctor in the house?” when an elderly audience member started having a seizure, Kitzhaber (a former emergency room doctor) hopped down from the podium, stabilized him, and once an ambulance had arrived, resumed debating.

• CA-03: Ami Bera continues to do well on the fundraising front; he raised $380K in the first quarter, and is sitting on $977K CoH as he prepares for a tough challenge to Republican Rep. Dan Lungren.

• DE-AL: We’re going to have a big-dollar race in the at-large seat in Delaware, which just had the entry of two different Republicans with the capacity to self-finance large sums. Democratic ex-LG John Carney is working hard to stay in the same ballpark; he raised $255K in the first quarter and sits on $675K.

• FL-08: Could we still see The Devil vs. Daniel Webster? Rep. Alan Grayson repelled the socially conservative former state Senator many months ago, forcing the NRCC to scramble to find a lesser replacement (businessman Bruce O’Donoghue seems to be their preferred pick, although state Rep. Kurt Kelly is also in the race). But now people close to Webster say he’s giving some consideration to getting back in the race (apparently undaunted by Grayson’s huge Q1 haul). Insiders seem to think that’s unlikely, though, given the late date.

• FL-19: Congratulations to our newest Democratic Congressperson, Rep. Ted Deutch. The winner of Tuesday’s special election was sworn in this afternoon.

• NY-01: The battle of the rich guys is on, in the GOP primary in the 1st. Facing well-connected Randy Altschuler, Chris Cox (son of state chair Ed Cox, and grandson of Richard Nixon) whipped out his own large balance sheet. He raised $735K for the quarter, and has $624K CoH. (Cox loaned himself $500K.)

• NY-20: Republican Chris Gibson seems to have finally locked down the GOP slot in the 20th, but he has a deep hole to dig his way out of, against Rep. Scott Murphy’s seven-digit warchest. Gibson raised $109K and has $92K CoH.

• OH-13: Wealthy car dealer Tom Ganley is moving even more of his own money into his uphill race against Rep. Betty Sutton. He loaned himself another $2 million (although apparently his cupboard was bare before he did so, as now his CoH is also $2 million). Sutton, seeming caught off-guard by Ganley’s entry, raised only $135K and is sitting on $281K.

• PA-06: Rep. Jim Gerlach raised $500K in his first quarter, after his belated decision to come back for his old job; he only has $335K CoH, though. Democratic opponent Doug Pike raised $225K but has $1.2 million CoH. (No word yet from his primary opponent, Manan Trivedi.)

• PA-07: Republican ex-US Attorney Pat Meehan continues to have a fundraising edge over Democratic state Rep. Bryan Lentz in the open seat in the 7th; Meehan raised $340K and has $855K CoH, while Lentz raised $235K and has $610K CoH.

• PA-08: Ex-Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick put up showy numbers a few days ago in his quest to get his seat back, but Rep. Patrick Murphy surpassed Fitzpatrick’s $510K. Murphy raised $586K and has $1.3 million CoH.

• PA-11: Finally, in Pennsylvania, Rep. Paul Kanjorski had a decent quarter, raising $260K (less than Lou Barletta’s $300K, but Kanjo has a mammoth CoH advantage, sitting on $1.2 million. Kanjorski’s Democratic primary rival Corey O’Brien has quite the burn rate: he raised $115K this quarter, but has only $47K CoH.

• Teabaggers: The Tea Party Express also issued a full target list today (no gun sights on their districts, though), and as befits their role as the corporate arm of the teabaggers, their goals aren’t that much different from those of the NRSC and NRCC. Top targets are (with the odd toss-in exception of Barney Frank) just the usual names considered most likely to lose, making it easy for them to claim they claimed some scalps come November: Harry Reid, Blanche Lincoln, Betsy Markey, Tom Perriello, and so on. They also list some heroes, and in the interest of bipartisan cover, they actually included a Democrat. In what’s not a surprise, it was ID-01’s Walt Minnick. (Wouldn’t it be ironic if their endorsement actually helped Minnick, likely to face a very close race this year, squeak by?) Also, on the teabagger front, Some Dude over at Salon looks at Tea Partier demographics and the roots of their resentments.

• Election results: Yesterday’s big event was the special election in FL-19, the first real electoral test after the passage of HCR. The allegedly massive opposition to healthcare reform on the part of the district’s many seniors never really materialized. Democratic state Sen. Ted Deutch beat Republican Ed Lynch 62-35, with very little falloff from Obama’s 65-34 performance in 2008. (Contrast that with John Garamendi’s so-so 53-43 performance in November’s CA-10 special election, a similarly 65-33 district in 2008.)

I should also pause to offer a little credit to Texas’s Republicans, who voted for the less crazy candidates in the Board of Education and Supreme Court runoffs, and in a bigger surprise to me, for the Hispanic-surnamed candidates in the TX-17 and TX-23 runoffs (which, based on incumbent Victor Carrillo’s trouncing in the Railroad Commissioner primary, seemed unlikely to happen). The NRCC has to be pleased to see the wealthier and less wingnutty Bill Flores and Quico Canseco emerge. Rep. Chet Edwards, however, is one guy who knows how to stand and fight, and he wasted no time hitting Flores hard and defining him as a carpetbagger in big oil’s pocket.

One other leftover issue from last night: two races in California, as expected, are headed to runoffs. In Republican-held SD-12, Republican Assemblyman Bill Emmerson will face off against Democrat Justin Blake (the GOPers combined got more than 60% of the vote, so this is a likely hold), while in safely-Democratic AD-43, Democratic lawyer Mike Gatto will face off with Republican Sunder Ramani to replace now-LA city councilor Paul Krekorian. Gatto seemed to shoot the gap in this heavily Armenian-American district after the two Armenian candidates, Chahe Keuroghelian and Nayiri Nahabedian, nuked each other.

• AR-Sen: Bill Halter’s primary campaign gained more momentum, as he picked up an endorsement from the Alliance for Retired Americans, pleased with his time as a Social Security Administration official. One group that really isn’t getting on board with Halter, though, is the Berry family; first outgoing Rep. Marion Berry dissed Halter, and now his son, Mitch, is head of a group, Arkansans for Common Sense, that’s running ads attacking Halter on the Social Security front. (Are there any Arkansans who are actually against common sense?)

• CO-Sen: Looks like GOP establishment candidate Jane Norton sees the handwriting on the wall and is taking a page from Democrat Michael Bennet’s book: not able to rely on getting on the ballot via activist-dominated convention (where teabagger-fueled Ken Buck seems likely to triumph), she’s making plans to qualify by finding 1,500 signatures in each of the state’s seven congressional districts. Speaking of Bennet, he’s still the fundraising kingpin in this race; he just announced he raised $1.4 million last quarter, well ahead of Norton’s $816K.

• FL-Sen: Charlie Crist may have sounded Shermanesque last week in his determination not to switch to an Independent bid for Governor, but apparently now there’s increasing moves within his inner circle to move in that direction. Unnamed advisors are floating the idea to the WSJ today.

• IN-Sen: Dan Coats seems to be having more trouble making the transition from the free-wheelin’ world of high-stakes lobbying back to the humdrum electoral politics world, where you actually have to follow the rules and stuff. He’s 10 days overdue on filing his finance disclosure reports with the FEC. One note that the Beltway press seemed to miss though: his main GOP primary opponent, ex-Rep. John Hostettler hasn’t made his filing yet either. (Of course, fundraising was never Hostettler’s strong suit. Or even his weak suit.)

• NC-Sen (pdf): PPP issued its latest installment in polls of the Senate general election in its home state. Maybe the biggest surprise is that incumbent Republican Richard Burr’s approvals are just continuing to fall; he’s currently at 32/41 (while likeliest opponent Elaine Marshall is in positive territory at 19/11). Also encouraging, I suppose, is that the actual human Democrats are starting to draw even with Generic D (while previous polls have had Generic D far outpacing them), showing they’re getting better-defined. Burr leads Generic D 43-38, while he leads Marshall 43-37, and leads both Cal Cunningham and Kenneth Lewis 43-35.

• NY-Sen-B: With ex-Gov. George Pataki’s phantom interest in this race finally having been dispelled, Swing State Project is removing this race from its “Races to Watch” list.

• PA-Sen, PA-Gov (pdf): One more poll in the rapidly-becoming-overpolled Pennsylvania Senate race, this time from Republican pollster Susequehanna. They use an LV model, and find Pat Toomey with a 48-38 lead over Arlen Specter. Of more immediate consequence, they find Specter leading Joe Sestak 42-28 in the Dem primary. They also polled both primaries in the gubernatorial race, finding Dan Onorato seeming to break away from the ill-defined pack among the Dems. Onorato is at 32, followed by Joe Hoeffel at 13, Jack Wagner at 6, and Anthony Williams at 4. Tom Corbett beats down Sam Rohrer on the GOP side, 50-7. After marshaling his resources, Specter is finally starting to open fire; he’s up with his first TV ad of the cycle starting today.

• WI-Sen: The only thing that’s sure is that Tommy Thompson likes to see his name in the press. There’s been a lot of conflicting reporting about Tommy Thompson today, with many outlets running with the story that he’s decided against running for Senate (that all traces back to one leak to a local TV station, although it sounds like Politico got some confirmation from an anonymous GOP source). Other outlets are emphasizing that Thompson’s spokesperson says that Thompson hasn’t made a final decision, though. Either way, Thompson will be announcing his plans at a Tea Party rally tomorrow in Madison, so our pain will be ended tomorrow one way or the other.

• MA-Gov: Here’s more evidence for my expectation that Dem-turned-indie Tim Cahill will be running to the right (or at least to the incoherent-angry-working-class-Catholic-guy-position) of the Republican in the Massachusetts gubernatorial race this year. He’s appearing at today’s Tea Party rally on Boston Common today, the same one with Sarah Palin that Scott Brown ditched (although MA-10 candidate Joe Malone and GOP gubernatorial underdog Christy Mihos will be there). Likely GOP gubernatorial nominee Charlie Baker (from the party’s old-school moderate WASP tradition) decided against attending, probably out of fears that he might get jostled by some ruffian and spill some of his gin and tonic on his white Bermuda shorts.

• MN-Gov: Two blasts from the past in the Minnesota gubernatorial race. Walter Mondale weighed in in favor of Democratic state House speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher, while a guy I’ve never heard of named Al Quie, who claims to have been governor from 1979 to 1983, endorsed Republican Marty Seifert.

• NE-Gov: Via press release, the campaign for Democratic candidate Mark Lakers let us know that he took in $314K, impressive considering his late entry to the campaign.

• AL-07: State Rep. Earl Hilliard Jr. got an endorsement from the United Steelworkers, a union that seems to still have a lot of clout in Birmingham, once a major steel town.

• AZ-03: Now here’s some news I didn’t expect: the fundraising champ in the 3rd isn’t one of the many state legislators running here, but rather attorney (and vice-presidential progeny) Ben Quayle. He pulled in $550K in the first quarter, thanks no doubt to family connections. There are a couple other self-funders in the race too, but the elected officials seem to be lagging: case in point, well-known ex-state Sen. Pamela Gorman, who raised only $37K and ends with $23K CoH.

• FL-24: Rep. Suzanne Kosmas announced a haul of $260K for the first quarter. That’s less than the $340K reported by her likely GOP opponent, steakhouse mogul Craig Miller (although a slab of his money was apparently carved out of his own personal funds); Kosmas has a big CoH advantage, though, sitting on more than $1 million.

• GA-07: Retiring Republican Rep. John Linder didn’t look far to endorse a replacement for him: he gave his nod to his former chief of staff, Rob Woodall.

• HI-01: Sen. Dan Inouye just transferred $100K of his money to the DCCC, despite appearances that they’re actively backing Ed Case, rather than Colleen Hanabusa, who has the support of Inouye (and pretty much everyone else in the local Democratic establishment). Inouye has apparently been working behind the scenes, including reaching out to Nancy Pelosi, to get the DCCC to dial back their Case support, so maybe the cash infusion will give him a little more leverage. (Inouye is sitting on $3.2 million and faces little if any opposition this year.)

• IN-03: Nice fundraising numbers from Democrat Tom Hayhurst, who ran a surprisingly close race against Rep. Mark Souder in 2006 and is back for another try. Hayhurst has racked up $234K CoH, more than Souder ($99K in the first quarter).

• IN-05: Politico has a look at Rep. Dan Burton’s difficult primary in the 5th, in Indianapolis’s dark-red suburbs. While Burton may actually be safer this year compared with 2008 (since he has four opponents instead of just one), the article traces the roots of the local GOP’s discontent with him, and also shows the magnitude of his collapse in support: only 2 of the 11 local party organizations are supporting Burton this time.

• MO-08: Another Dem in a dark-red seat who keeps impressing everybody with his tenacity is Tommy Sowers. The veteran and college instructor, who’s challenging Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, raised $295K in the first quarter and is now sitting on $675K CoH.

• NM-02: Ex-Rep. Steve Pearce can write himself his own checks if he needs to, but he may not need to at this rate. Pearce raised $277K in the first quarter, and now sits on $708K. Democratic Rep. Harry Teague hasn’t reported yet, but in the duel of wealthy oil guys, he can self-fund too if need be.

• NY-14: With Democratic primary challenger Reshma Saujani having some success on the financial front, Rep. Carolyn Maloney got some top-tier help from Barack Obama, who endorsed her and sent out a fundraising appeal on her behalf.

• PA-11: If this doesn’t wake up Rep. Paul Kanjorski from his nap, I don’t know what will. Three-time Republican opponent Lou Barletta raised $300K in the first quarter. An important caveat: there was no mention of cash on hand, which is telling because Barletta was still saddled with a lot of debt from his 2008 campaign when he decided to run again. (UPDATE: Barletta’s CoH is now $205K.)

• PA-17: Republican state Sen. David Argall raised a tolerable but not-too-impressive $125K in the first quarter. He’ll need more than that to battle Rep. Tim Holden, who, if nothing else, has great survival skills (he had the worst district of any freshman who survived 1994, and then survived a 2002 gerrymander designed to rub him out). In fact, he’ll need more than that just for his primary; heretofore unknown GOP opponent ex-Marine Frank Ryan raised $70K in the first quarter.

• Redistricting: Maryland beat out New York to be the first state in the nation to enact legislation that will, in terms of redistricting, treat prisoners as residents of their last known address, rather than where they’re incarcerated (and thus move the center of gravity back toward the cities from the countryside). Also, on the redistricting front, if there’s one group of people who are the target audience for a whole movie about redistricting (Gerrymandering), it’s the crowd at SSP. The film’s director has a diary up, touting its release in two weeks at the Tribeca Film Festival.

• CO-Sen, CO-Gov: As we mentioned on the front page yesterday, Andrew Romanoff won the Democratic primary precinct-level caucuses last night; the final tally, percentage-wise, was 51-42 (with 7% uncommitted) over Michael Bennet (who, by the way, hit the airwaves with the first TV spot yesterday, a decidedly anti-Washington ad). Things were actually much closer on the GOP side, where it looks like ultra-conservative Weld County DA Ken Buck is actually leading establishment fave Jane Norton by a paper-thin margin (37.9% to 37.7%). Of course, the activist-dominated straw polls are going to be Buck’s strong suit and his strength here may not translate as well to the broader GOP electorate, but he performed well enough to show that he’s in this for the long haul. (A similar dynamic played out in the Governor’s race, where ex-Rep. Scott McInnis easily beat teabagger Dan Maes, 61-39, although Maes has polled in the single digits out in reality.)

• NC-Sen (pdf): PPP’s monthly poll of the North Carolina Senate race general election shows little change, with Richard Burr (with a 35/37 approval) still winning in very humdrum fashion. Burr leads Elaine Marshall 41-36 (a positive trend, as she was down by 10 last month, although she was also within 5 of Burr in December). He also leads both Cal Cunningham and Kenneth Lewis 43-32, and leads Generic Dem only 41-39. With low familiarity for all three Dems (Marshall’s the best-known, but even she generates 71% “not sure”s), PPP’s Tom Jensen expects the race to tighten once they actually have a nominee.

• WA-Sen: Here’s some food for thought on why Dino Rossi has retreated back to the private sector and has seemed reluctant to come back out to play, despite the NRSC’s constant entreaties: his financial links to Seattle real estate developer Michael Mastro, whose local real estate empire collapsed in late 2008, leaving hundreds of investors out to dry.

• MA-Gov: Here’s more evidence that Tim Cahill, a Democrat until a few months ago, is heading off to the right to try and claim some of Republican Charlie Baker’s turf for his independent challenge to Deval Patrick: he fessed up to having voted for John McCain and is attacking Massachusetts’s universal health care plan (which even Scott Brown didn’t have a beef with, during his campaign) and saying that if the nation took the same approach it would be bankrupt “in four years.”

• NM-Gov: Oooops. Pete Domenici Jr. got a little presumptuous prior to the state’s Republican convention, issuing fliers touting his “great success” and his getting put on the ballot. Turns out neither happened — his 5% showing was last place, not a great success, and didn’t qualify him for the ballot either (he can still do so by gathering signatures).

• NY-Gov: This may be a tea leaf that Democratic Suffolk Co. Exec Steve Levy is gearing up to challenge ex-Rep. Rick Lazio for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. He hired a Republican consultant, Michael Hook, to help with preparations. Meanwhile, will the last person left in David Paterson‘s employ please turn the lights out? Another top staffer, press secretary Marissa Shorenstein just hit the exits today.

• PA-Gov, PA-Sen: Could ex-Rep. Joe Hoeffel be knocked off the Democratic gubernatorial primary ballot? That’s what Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato is trying to make happen, as his team is challenging the validity of Hoeffel’s 7,632 ballot petitions. In order to qualify for the ballot, candidates need 2,000 valid signatures, including at least 100 from 10 different counties. (JL) Hoeffel’s not the only one; Joe Sestak‘s also challenging signatures in the Senate primary. Sestak’s target isn’t Arlen Specter, though, but rather Joseph Vodvarka, a Pittsburgh-area businessman who was a surprise last-minute filer and is the primary’s only third wheel. Sestak, no doubt, is worried that Vodvarka could peel off enough anti-Specter votes to throw a very close election.

• HI-01: Here’s a sign of life from the seemingly placid Colleen Hanabusa campaign; she just got the endorsement of the Hawaii State Teachers’ Association. (Not that it was likely they’d endorse Ed Case, but it’s still important for GOTV.)

• NY-13: Politico’s Ben Smith reported that Republican state Senator Andrew Lanza was taking a second look at the race in the 13th, now that the possibility of the Working Families Party withdrawing its support for Rep. Mike McMahon (if he votes against health care reform) could make a GOP challenge easier in the face of a divided left. The NRCC denied having reached out to Lanza; Lanza confirmed, though, that they had, but said that he was still unlikely to get in the race, preferring to focus on taking back GOP control of the state Senate. While the two GOPers in the race, Michael Grimm and Michael Allegretti, both have had some fundraising success, Lanza would be a definite upgrade for the GOP in the unlikely event he runs.

• PA-06: Another bummer for Doug Pike, who seems to be losing as many endorsements as he’s gaining these days. State Rep. Josh Shapiro, who briefly explored a bid for U.S. Senate last year, has officially switched his endorsement from Pike to “neutral”. (JL)

• SC-03: With rivals Rex Rice and Jeff Duncan (both state Reps.) having gotten the lion’s share of the endorsements and money, state Sen. Shane Massey appears ready to drop out of the GOP primary field in the 3rd. It looks like it’ll be a two-man fight between the Huckabee-backed Rice and CfG-backed Duncan.

• VA-05: I’ll repeat all the usual caveats about how straw polls reflect the most extreme and engaged activists, not the broader electorate, bla bla bla, but there’s just no good way for state Sen. Robert Hurt to spin his showing at the Franklin County GOP Republican Womens’ straw poll. The establishment pick drew 11.6% of the vote, while self-funding teabagger Jim McKelvey grabbed 51%.

• WA-03: The Dick Army (aka FreedomWorks) has weighed in with a rare primary endorsement in a rather unexpected place: the GOP primary in the open seat in the 3rd. They endorsed David Castillo, the financial advisor and former Bush administration underling who stayed in the race despite state Rep. Jaime Herrera’s entry. Here’s the likely explanation: Castillo actually used to work for FreedomWorks’ predecessor organization, Citizens for a Sound Economy. Still, that’s a boost for Castillo, who’s been faring pretty well on the endorsements front against the establishment pick Herrera (and a boost for Dems, who’d no doubt like to see a brutal GOP primary). Meanwhile, on the Dem side, state Sen. Craig Pridemore is holding outgoing Rep. Brian Baird’s feet to the fire to get him to switch his vote to “yes” on health care reform; primary opponent Denny Heck has avoided taking much of a position on HCR.

• Census: Here’s some interesting background on how the Census protects respondents’ privacy. Not only are individual responses sealed for 72 years, but the Census intentionally adds “noise” that camouflages individuals whose particular combination of data would make them unique in some way and thus not be anonymous, at least to someone seeking them out (for instance, they cite the hypothetical only 65-year-old married woman attending college in North Dakota). (P.S.: You probably got your form in the last day or two. Please fill it out!)

Public Policy Polling (3/5-8, likely primary voters):

Michael Bennet (D-inc): 40

Andrew Romanoff (D): 34

Undecided: 26

(MoE: ±4.6%)

Jane Norton (R): 34

Ken Buck (R): 17

Tom Wiens (R): 7

Others: 9

Undecided: 32

(MoE: ±4.4%)

For the Democratic field, that’s a surprisingly close result. At this point, though, neither Bennet nor Romanoff are drawing the bulk of their support from clearly identifiable blocs. Jensen:

In the Democratic Senate contest Michael Bennet leads Andrew Romanoff 40-34. Support in this race may end up having to do more with personalities than ideology, as there’s no real divide in support along liberal/moderate lines for now. Bennet’s up 42-33 with liberals and 40-36 with moderates. Both candidates are pretty well liked by the party electorate. Bennet’s approval is a 57/21 spread with primary voters and Romanoff’s favorability comes down at 45/15. The one place where there is a clear division is along racial lines. Bennet’s up 42-34 with whites while Romanoff has the 42-31 advantage with Hispanics.

That’s all well and good, but Romanoff will be hard-pressed not to be swamped out by Bennet’s huge fundraising edge in advance of the primary.

PPP also threw in a question on the Republican gubernatorial primary, and found Scott McInnis sleepwalking to victory with a 58-8 lead over Some Dude Dan Maes.

Public Policy Polling (3/5-8, registered voters, 8/14-16/2009 in parens):

Michael Bennet (D-inc): 43

Jane Norton (R): 43

Undecided: 14

Michael Bennet (D-inc): 45

Tom Wiens (R): 37

Undecided: 18

Michael Bennet (D-inc): 46 (39)

Ken Buck (R): 36 (35)

Undecided: 14 (26)

Andrew Romanoff (D): 44

Jane Norton (R): 39

Undecided: 17

Andrew Romanoff (D): 44

Tom Wiens (R): 36

Undecided: 20

Andrew Romanoff (D): 45

Ken Buck (R): 34

Undecided: 21

(MoE: ±4.1%)

The one saving grace for Bennet here is that, while he holds an unsurprisingly poor 32-46 approval rating, the GOP front-runner, Jane Norton, isn’t looking too great herself. Her favorable rating is 25-35, which is not something you usually see for relatively undefined challengers so early in the game.

These numbers also confirm what we’ve been seeing in other polls suggesting that Andrew Romanoff is in better shape for the general election than Bennet. Jensen has some good words of caution about reading too much into that, though:

I would be cautious about declaring Romanoff to be the more electable candidate based on these early numbers though. Bennet has had all the negatives of incumbency- being associated with an unpopular majority party during a recession- without the positives- defining himself positively to the voters on the airwaves in the context of a statewide campaign. If Romanoff is still doing better than Bennet four or five months from now once the voters have started really paying attention the electability argument might carry more heft.

• CO-Sen: Gee, tell us what you really think, Jane Norton! The supposed front-runner for the GOP nod just referred to Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” while appearing at a teabagger forum. I’m sure the 600,000 or so Coloradans who receive Social Security will be glad to hear that.

• FL-Sen: PPP’s Tom Jensen has some observations on the Florida race, that also seem generalizable to the national landscape and pretty much every other race. Very few people are changing their minds between the parties, he finds: only 8% of Obama voters plan to vote for Marco Rubio, actually lower than the 11% of McCain voters planning to vote for Kendrick Meek. The difference is in the intensity between the parties, which shapes the likely voter model. Barack Obama won Florida by 3, while PPP’s sample went for McCain by 4; that 7-point shift is similar to what they found in New Jersey and Massachusetts as well.

• OH-Sen: We’re very short on details, but Chris Cillizza is pointing to a DSCC poll (taken by Mark Mellman) finding Democratic Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher leading GOP ex-Rep. Rob Portman 37-36 in the Senate race. (There’s no mention of primary numbers or a Jennifer Brunner matchup.) We’ll fill in the blanks more if we see a copy of the memo.

• MI-Gov: Michigan-based pollster Denno-Noor takes another look at the primaries in the Michigan governor’s race. On the GOP side, Rep. Peter Hoekstra leads at 28% (up from 21 in November), followed by self-proclaimed nerd Rick Snyder at 18 (up from 5). This poll confirms the most recent EPIC-MRA poll’s finding of Snyder’s advertising-based surge, and the subsequent decline for AG Mike Cox. He’s at 12 in this poll, down from 15. Oakland Co. Sheriff Mike Bouchard is at 8, and state Sen. Tom George is at 2. On the Democratic side, they find a lot of uncertainty: state House speaker Andy Dillon leads Lansing mayor Virg Bernero 13-11, with 6% each for state Rep. Alma Wheeler Smith and for Dan Kildee, who has since dropped out (although he was in the race while the poll was in the field). Undecided wins, at 56%. There are no trendlines on the Dem side, given the dropout of Lt. Gov. John Cherry since the last poll. (Speaking of Cherry, there are odd rumors out there that unions are asking the woeful Cherry to get back into the race, which doesn’t jibe with the UAW’s recent decision to back Bernero.)

• NY-Gov: This is what passes for a good news day for David Paterson: the growing likelihood that he won’t face any criminal charges over allegations of witness tampering in the domestic violence investigation involving a top aide. On the GOP side, ex-Rep. Rick Lazio rolled out one more endorsement from the party’s old war horses as party bosses keep looking elsewhere for a suitable candidate; today, it was Rep. Peter King‘s turn to give Lazio the thumbs-up.

• PA-Gov: More progress on the endorsements front in the fight for the Democratic nomination. Allegheny Co. Exec Dan Onorato got the endorsement of the state’s largest teachers union, the Pennsylvania State Education Association. Meanwhile, Auditor Jack Wagner continued to dominate in terms of endorsements from county-level party apparatuses, getting the endorsement in Schuylkill County, out in coal country.

• MI-13: This isn’t a good day for Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick. She and one of her aides just got subpoenaed by a federal grand jury, in the investigation into her son, former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. On top of that, state Sen. Hansen Clarke made official his primary challenge to Kilpatrick. She barely survived the Democratic primary in 2008, and that was largely because of a split among several challengers.

• NY-23: Doug Hoffman is making a move… to the 23rd District, where he plans to run again. One knock against Hoffman last year was that he lived in Lake Placid, which is outside the district. He’s moving nine miles down the road to Saranac Lake, which falls in the 23rd’s lines.

• PA-07: With filing day having passed in Pennsylvania, now it’s time to count the signatures, and one candidates who’s running into some trouble is a surprise: the squeaky-clean former US Attorney Pat Meehan, the Republican running in the 7th. He’s asked the Delaware County DA to investigate his own signatures, after finding about some potentially fraudulent signatures on his lists. Meanwhile, Meehan seems to have dodged a long-rumored primary challenge from former TV news reporter Dawn Stensland, who never filed to run.

• CA-LG: San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom looks like he’s going to go ahead and voluntarily demote himself to the no-man’s land that is Lt. Governor. He paid his filing fee yesterday, and will have an official kickoff for his campaign either today or tomorrow.

• Demographics: Alan Abramowitz has a very interesting piece on demographic change and how it only bodes ill for Republicans (or at least the current angry-white-guy version of the Republicans) in the long run. That angry white base keeps shrinking as a percentage of the population, with non-whites on track to be 35% of the electorate by 2020.

• Branding: With his presidential run (and its ubiquitous star and blue background) fading in the rear-view mirror, John McCain has launched a completely new logo to go with his new persona. It has a flowing flag instead, on a background that’s much… um… whiter.

• AR-Sen: Like I always say, flip-flopping at every opportunity is the best way to win elections. Then:

Lincoln: I Will Fight Reconciliation as Tool to Achieve Health Insurance Reform

Now:

Asked twice whether she was wavering on her previous statements to vote against a reconciliation bill, Lincoln said: “I’ll wait to see what’s in it.”

Considering she already voted for healthcare reform in the first place, this actually is probably the better move for her, believe it or not. (D)

• CO-Sen, CO-Gov: More evidence that the teabaggers and assorted other movement conservative aren’t takin’ kindly to outsiders coming in and imposing Jane Norton on them. Norton lost a GOP straw poll to right-wing Weld County DA Ken Buck after a Denver candidate forum sponsored by the Tea Partiers and 9-12ers. Interestingly, no-name Dan Maes also triumphed over ex-Rep. Scott McInnis on the gubernatorial side.

• LA-Sen: Rep. Charlie Melancon is going on the offensive, having a lot of ground to make up against David Vitter if polls are any indication. He’s filed an ethics complaint against Vitter for having violated federal law by sending out fundraising appeals on official Senate letterhead.

• NY-Sen-B: Hardcore movement conservative and – get this – former chief economist for Bear Stearns (!!) David Malpass says he’s weighing a run against Kirsten Gillibrand, presumably as a Republican. Jonathan Chait hits all the high points as to how badly out-of-touch Malpass is, and Paul Krugman zings him for an especially good bit of moranocity. If I were Gillibrand, I think I’d love to go up against a mouthbreather like this. (D)

• PA-Sen: Arlen Specter got a boost from labor, with an endorsement from the United Auto Workers. Also, speaking of Pennsylvania, check out my latest installment at Salon.com, where I used the disparate polling in PA-Sen as a means of introducing the non-SSP-reading masses to the idea of polling likely voters vs. registered voters.

• WA-Sen: It looks like the NRSC hasn’t given up on trying to lure Dino Rossi into the Senate race, as Rossi has confirmed having had a conversation with John Cornyn about it. Rossi continues to maintain a “never say never” attitude about it in the face of questions. The NRSC may also have a Plan B if Rossi says no, that’s an upgrade from their current top candidate, state Sen. Don Benton. They’re also interested in former news anchor Susan Hutchison. Despite presenting a somewhat moderate profile and the advantage of running without an “R” next to her name in the nonpartisan race, she still managed to rack up only 41% while losing November’s King County Executive race. (Still, that makes her only a one-time loser, compared with Rossi’s two strikes.) Hutchison says that she’s undecided, and she’ll wait for Rossi’s decision to make her own.

• IA-Gov: One other candidate who’s not faring so well in the straw poll venue, despite an overwhelming consensus from the political establishment, is ex-Gov. Terry Branstad. He just lost a quick succession of three different county-level straw polls to social conservative Bob Vander Plaats, and these aren’t dinky rural counties either. Vander Plaats cleaned up in Woodbury County (his home turf of Sioux City), while earning narrow victories in Story County (Davenport Ames) and Dallas County (Des Moines suburbs).

• NY-Gov: Andrew Cuomo may not be a declared candidate for Governor just yet, but he’s certainly fundraising like one. His camp is planning to hold a high-priced fundraiser in DC on March 22nd with some high-powered Democratic money players in attendance. (JL) Some of David Paterson’s nosediving approvals may have rubbed off a bit on Cuomo, if Marist‘s new snap poll (pdf) is any indication: Cuomo’s approval is down to a relatively human 54/39. Paterson is at an appalling 19/79, but 68% say he might as well still serve out his term with 28% saying resign. Still trying to find an upgrade from the lackluster campaign of Rick Lazio to go up against Cuomo, the GOP is meeting with conservaDem Suffolk Co. Exec Steve Levy (who’s been mulling a run in the Democratic primary) to try and get him to switch over to the GOP line to run for Governor.

• DE-AL: Republicans may have found an upgrade in the Delaware at-large seat, which has pretty much already slipped out of their grasp but where they can at least force former Democratic Lt. Gov. John Carney to work for it. They’re courting philanthropist Michele Rollins, the widow of former Republican Lt. Gov. John Rollins (and a former Miss USA) who has access to her former husband’s personal fortune.

• LA-02: Rep. Joe Cao seems to have read yesterday’s big expose of BaseConnect (the former BMW Direct) at TPM, and it seems to have been the first time he’d learned that they’re up to no good. He just severed all ties with the group, who’ve been doing his fundraising for the last year (and skimming off almost all his proceeds, which explains his terrible burn rate). Does this mean that no one from the NRCC was giving him any guidance on how to raise funds? It doesn’t seem like the kind of scam an incumbent would ordinarily fall for.

• NY-23: Doug Hoffman’s made it official – he’s going to try to win the Republican, Conservative, and Independence Party nominations, “and unite them, as one team, to defeat the agenda of Nancy Pelosi and Bill Owens.” Sounds like someone has seen the Lord of the Rings movies a few times too many. This also seems a wee bit delusional, since of course most of the Independence Party quickly embraced Owens (who seems like a good fit for them) when Dede Scozzafava abandoned the race at the last moment. (D)

• NY-29: Strike two names from the list of potential Democratic candidates for the special election to replace crumb-bum Rep. Eric Massa. Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton has announced that she won’t run for the seat, as has Monroe County DA Mike Green. (JL) On the GOP side, state Sen. Cathy Young has also just declined.

• PA-12: Barbara Hafer continues to attack the manner in which former Murtha aide Mark Critz was selected as the Dem nominee for the May special election – and by extention the people behind the process. Several Dems have gone on record expressing their distaste for Hafer’s attacks, and state party chair T. J. Rooney thinks they contributed to her being passed over. (D)

• TN-03: Democrats seem to have found a willing candidate, finally, to fill the gap in the open seat in the R+13 3rd (which looked like a promising race while former Insurance Comm. Paula Flowers was in it). Brenda Short decided to take the plunge; she used to be a Hill aide long ago for former Rep. Marilyn Lloyd (whose 1994 retirement turned the seat over to Rep. Zach Wamp, who’s finally vacating the seat to run for Governor).

• OR-Treasurer, OR-04: In something of a surprise, Multnomah County Chair Ted Wheeler today got named as interim state Treasurer, in the wake of the unfortunate death of Ben Westlund. Wheeler will still need to run again in a special election to be held as part of the November 2010 ballot; he’s confirmed he’ll run in that election but will face at least two prominent Dems: retiring state Sen. Rick Metsger (well-known from his time as local sports anchor), who filed yesterday before Wheeler’s appointment, and former Treasurer (and 2006 gubernatorial primary contestant) Jim Hill. Adding to the general sense of chaos is that it’s the last day of filing in Oregon, meaning now people are piling into Wheeler’s vacant seat as well. Finally, it looks like, with Springfield mayor Sid Leiken’s departure, OR-04 Rep. Peter DeFazio will merely face Some Dude: home-schooling activist Art Robinson.

• West Virginia: One other state where the filing deadline has passed is West Virginia. Despite the state’s red-ward trend (and significant challenges to both its Dem Reps., Alan Mollohan and Nick Rahall), one area where the GOP doesn’t look poised to make much of any progress is the state legislature, already thoroughly dominated by Democrats. In fact, if the Republicans won every race in the state Senate where they managed to field a candidate, they still would come up short on controlling the chamber. In the state House, they managed to leave 27 seats uncontested.  

• AR-Sen: Local publication Talk Business has polled Blanche Lincoln’s approval on a regular basis for the last year, and she’s in the worst shape yet, they find: her approvals are down to 38/56, down from 45/45 three months ago.

• CO-Sen: After Rasmussen showed him in not-so-good shape over the weekend, Michael Bennet is out with his own internal poll from Harstad Research showing him up (barely) over Jane Norton. He leads Norton 41-40, and claims a 41-31 edge among independents. (If that disparity doesn’t seem to pencil out, that’s because the poll includes more registered Republicans than Democrats, reflecting the state’s registration balance.) The poll’s a little weird, though: it’s a combination of two different surveys, one in January and one in February, and there are no details on his primary matchup with Andrew Romanoff.

• FL-Sen: John Cornyn is sorta-kinda walking back the NRSC endorsement of Charlie Crist in the Florida Senate race, saying that was made before anyone had an inkling it would turn out to be an actual race. He didn’t rescind the endorsement, but made clear the NRSC wouldn’t be spending any money trying to affect the primary between Crist and Marco Rubio.

• NJ-Sen: Here’s some welcome news: after receiving treatment for stomach cancer, Frank Lautenberg is back on the job. He was back on the Hill late last week, and participated in a St. Patrick’s Day parade over the weekend.

• NY-Sen: Good news for Chuck Schumer, I suppose. Conservative pundit Larry Kudlow confirmed that he isn’t currently planning to challenge Schumer in the Senate this year. So, Schumer goes from a race against a guy he was beating by 40 points, to having no opponent at all.

• OH-Sen: There will be only two Democrats on the ballot for Senate this year: Lee Fisher and Jennifer Brunner. The other two random interlopers who popped up several weeks ago, TJ Johnson (a former Fisher underling whose presence briefly aroused some suspicions of shenanigans) and Charlena Bradley, didn’t have the signatures to qualify for the ballot.

• OR-Sen: Law professor Jim Huffman, who most people became aware of only when Rasmussen polled him against Ron Wyden, went ahead and made it official: he’s running for Senate. Blue Oregon has a nice rundown of his strange campaign kickoff at a heavy machinery dealer (shades of Carly Fiorina?), intended to showcase how the stimulus hasn’t worked (except for the little detail that the same machinery dealer credits the stimulus for saving jobs there…).

• WI-Sen: Another Tommy Thompson acquaintance is fanning the flames, saying he’s “very seriously considering” a Senate bid and “could” soon form an exploratory committee. I’m not sure “could” is very newsworthy, but we’ll continue to keep an eye on the situation.

• AK-Gov: Appointed Gov. Sean Parnell’s GOP primary opponent, former state House speaker Ralph Samuels, raised some eyebrows with his prodigious fundraising. However, it looks like Parnell is still in good shape as far as the voters are concerned, at least according to an internal poll taken by Republican firm Basswood. They find Parnell with a 71/8 favorable and leading Samuels in the primary 69-9 (with 4 for Bill Walker).

• CA-Gov: Insurance Comm. Steve Poizner has been making some strong moves to the right lately in order to differentiate himself from Meg Whitman, even flip-flopping on abortion. (He got a 100% rating from Planned Parenthood six years ago, but now he’s against any government funding for abortion.) While he still lags in the polls, it’s at least gaining him some traction on the endorsement front, as he got the nod from the California Republican Assembly (which also endorsed Chuck DeVore on the Senate side) and from Rep. Tom McClintock.

• NY-Gov (pdf): Two more polls on David Paterson’s standing find voters fairly split on whether he should stay or go. Siena finds 55% think he should serve the rest of his term while 37% say resign (and only 21% saying he should be impeached if he doesn’t resign), while SurveyUSA finds 45% say he should remain in office and 50% say resign. (He has a 25/66 approval according to SurveyUSA and a 21/67 favorable according to Siena.) Siena also looks at November’s race, finding Andrew Cuomo leading Rick Lazio by an unsurprising 63-25 margin.

• OR-Gov: The state Republicans held their annual Dorchester Conference, which included a gubernatorial straw poll after appearances from the candidates. In a bit of a surprise, Allen Alley (considered the old-school moderate in the race, to the extent that he used to be deputy chief of staff to Democratic Gov. Ted Kulongoski) dominated, winning with 225 votes to 165 for substance-less former NBA player Chris Dudley. (Former state Sen. John Lim got 47, and antitax weirdo Bill Sizemore got 1.) Meanwhile, over on the Dem side, a lot of big labor endorsements got rolled out, and the two candidates both got their fair share. John Kitzhaber got the muscle – AFL-CIO and Teamsters – while Bill Bradbury got the brains: the Oregon Education Association and American Federation of Teachers. Finally, Oregon lost a well-liked political figure who briefly ran for Governor in 2006: Republican state Sen.-turned-Democratic state Treasurer Ben Westlund, who died from a recurrence of lung cancer over the weekend.

• CA-47: Businessman and veteran Quang Pham was mounting a strong challenge, at least on the fundraising front, in the GOP primary to Assemblyman Van Tran, to the extent that the NRCC took notice and put him “On the Radar.” However, he bailed out of the race on Friday, citing the need to get back to his day job, although he may also have been concerned that the three Vietnamese candidates competing in the primary might split the vote to the extent that it would let no-name Anglo Kathy Smith with the primary.

• IA-03, MO-04: Two old guys who’ve been on everybody’s retirement watch lists despite continuous reassurances that they’re running for re-election made it about as official as can be. Leonard Boswell and Ike Skelton have both filed to run one more time.

• KS-04: State Sen. Dick Kelsey, one of half a dozen Republicans fighting for the open seat in the Wichita-based 4th left behind by Rep. Todd Tiahrt, has suspended his campaign. He cited his wife’s health problems, and reserved the right to get back in the race later.

• MA-10: Some comings and goings in the Democratic field in the now-open 10th: as expected, Norfolk County DA William Keating is confirming he’ll run for the Dem nod. However, oft-mentioned state Rep. Ron Mariano said he’ll pass on the race.

• PA-12: As we wait for a verdict from the state Democratic Party’s executive committee, here’s some interesting scuttlebutt. Pa2010 cites an unnamed high-level party insider as saying it’s “highly unlikely” that Mark Critz (former John Murtha district director) gets picked by the state committee, which has the final decision despite the local party’s choice of Critz over the weekend. He cites concerns over Critz’s electability stemming from tax problems at a company he’d helped run. Pa2010 also hears rumors that Cambria County Controller Ed Cernic Jr., who made little impact at the local convention, could wind up being the compromise pick, as he fits the district’s blue-collar pro-life pro-gun mold better than Barbara Hafer but without Critz’s possible baggage. We’ll know soon whether this is actually happening, or the source was just a guy with an ax to grind.

• DCCC: The D-Trip has named Bruce Braley, Allyson Schwarz, Patrick Murphy, and Donna Edwards as chairs of this cycle’s Red to Blue program. While the DCCC has announced some “races to watch,” it hasn’t officially named anyone to R2B yet. Also, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Steve Israel “will take on additional responsibility this cycle with Democratic incumbents who are not on the DCCC’s Frontline Program.” I don’t know if this means helping folks like Ike Skelton who are vulnerable but not on Frontline, or harassing the crap out of safe members who haven’t fulfilled their dues payments. Hopefully both. (D)

• Fundraising: With Bill Russell back in the news with the PA-12 special election, TPM’s back on the case of shady GOP fundraising firm BMW Direct, which raises big bucks for gullible candidates with high-profile opponents and keeps almost all of the money for itself. They’ve changed their name to BaseConnect, but are up to the same old tricks. And I actually feel a little bad about this… Rep. Joe Cao looks like he’s gotten tangled up in their web, which explains his fundraising “success” and his near-total burn rate.

• State legislatures: In the diaries, Johnny Longtorso has a comprehensive look at the legislatures that the Dems control and are defending in the 2008 election. There are major redistricting stakes at issue in many of the races, including some where the odds don’t look too good, especially Pennsylvania’s House.

• AR-Sen: Here’s one way in which Blanche Lincoln can breathe a little easier: she’s not getting a primary challenge from the right (as if there were any room on the right of her within the Democratic electorate). State Sen. President Bob Johnson, who floated the idea in August, said he won’t run against her. However, she’s drawing heat on her left from African-American groups; the state’s NAACP is upset that she hasn’t done more to appoint African-American federal judges. With Lincoln already on environmentalists’ hit list and organized labor unenthused about her, there isn’t much left of the Democratic base she can afford to tick off. A primary from the left from Lt. Gov. Bill Halter is still possible – although if there’s one guy whose support Halter can’t count on, it’s retiring Blue Dog Rep. Marion Berry (saying it was a fluke Halter got elected LG in the first place, and that Halter “is only of consequence in his own mind”).

• CO-Sen: Former state House speaker Andrew Romanoff is counting on labor backing in the Democratic primary, but Michael Bennet got a key boost; he got the endorsement of the SEIU. (That public option letter is already paying dividends.) Meanwhile, Romanoff seems to be staking his hopes on a strong showing in Colorado’s party insider-dominated caucus and convention process that begins next month, in order to catapult him into contention. (It’s non-binding, and candidates can still win the primary without winning at the convention, with Ken Salazar as Exhibit A.) On the GOP side, former LG Jane Norton is getting slammed from the right by former state Sen. Tom Wiens for her support (following the lead of Republican Gov. Bill Owens) of Referendum C, which passed and lifted certain spending limits imposed by a previous TABOR initiative.

• FL-Sen: We’ll have to see if this does anything to tarnish that conservative halo that’s gleaming over Marco Rubio’s head. Revelations came out (via Jim Greer, the Charlie Crist ally who recently got bounced out his place as state GOP chair) that Rubio charged $13,900 in personal expenses to a party-issued credit card over the course of several years. I don’t see this as a game-changer, but it’s the first hard blow the Crist camp has been able to land in a while.

• GA-Sen: Rasmussen finds that the anti-incumbent blues are even weighing down super-safe Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson a bit, as he’s below 50%. Too bad the Democrats don’t have a top-tier candidate to go against him (although it seems like they have a few spares in the gubernatorial race who might consider making the jump). Isakson beats Generic Dem by 49-36.

• NY-Sen-B: Harold Ford Jr.’s big night out at the Stonewall Dems didn’t quite go according to plan. He was repeatedly heckled and shouted down as he attempted to explain his convenient road-to-Damascus conversion on matters such as gay marriage. It also turns out that Ford’s former House colleagues from the New York delegation aren’t much more enthused about his run, either. The majority of the delegation has already endorsed Kirsten Gillibrand, and no one has backed down from that, with Ed Towns, Greg Meeks, Jerry Nadler, Tim Bishop, and Carolyn McCarthy all offering public statements discouraging his run.

• UT-Sen: Wow, yet another Republican is going to get into the primary against Bob Bennett, who has a bullseye on his back because of occasional acts of cooperation instead of lockstep obstructionism. This one is actually a step above the rest of the field… or maybe not. Ex-Rep. Merrill Cook says he’s going to get in the race. An ex-Rep. is nothing to sneeze at (especially when none of the other contestants have gotten elected to anything before), but on the other hand, Cook was kind of an eccentric who frequently ran for office until lucking out in 1996. His hotheadedness got him primaried out in 2000 (and Jim Matheson went on to pick up the seat for the Dems that year).

• NY-Gov: The blowback from yesterday’s NYT article is already hitting David Paterson’s inner circle, suggesting he isn’t going to be able to shrug this off. Paterson’s Criminal Justice Coordinator, Denise O’Donnell, resigned in protest over having been lied to by the state police.

• OR-Gov: Local Republican pollster Moore Insight takes a look at the gubernatorial race — and they find ex-Gov. John Kitzhaber doing a lot better than Rasmussen did. They find Kitzhaber has identical 45-33 leads over the two GOPers they judged the strongest, Allen Alley and Chris Dudley. (Rasmussen actually found long-forgotten ex-state Sen. John Lim fared the best against Kitzhaber of the four GOPers, but apparently Moore didn’t think Lim was worth polling; Rasmussen had Dudley within 6 of Kitzhaber and Alley trailing by 8.) Moore didn’t poll the primaries, or how Democratic ex-SoS Bill Bradbury would fare.

• SC-Gov: Winthrop University polled South Carolina without doing gubernatorial head-to-heads, but that may not matter as they also found that few people know anything about anybody who’s running; only LG Andre Bauer came close to 50% name rec. They did find 43 61% approval for Jim DeMint, 39 45% approval for Lindsey Graham, and a surprisingly high (for SC) 48% approval for Barack Obama.

• AK-AL: Businessman, blogger, and gadfly Andrew Halcro (who ran as an indie in the 2006 gubernatorial race) sounds like he’s backing down from his planned Republican primary challenge to Rep. Don Young. He cited other developments (all positive) in his business and family life.

• HI-01: It looks like Hawaii’s election officials found enough change under the couch cushions to throw together a special election to replace retiring Rep. Neil Abercrombie, after all. They’ve tentatively set a May 22 date for the all-party winner-take-all election. All three candidates plan to run again in the September primary for the regularly-scheduled election.

• NJ-03: It looks like NFL player and gentleman farmer Jon Runyan may have a less tortuous path to the GOP nomination than Chris Myers did in 2008 (which helped contribute to Rep. John Adler’s victory that year). Toms River Committeeman Maurice Hill (the dreaded rear admiral who was the favorite of the Ocean County GOP) decided that he won’t run, meaning that all of the county organizations are likely to coalesce around Runyan. Runyan already has the support of the Burlington County party.

• PA-12: After recently deciding not to run, Joyce Murtha weighed in with an endorsement in the battle to replace her deceased husband. She endorsed Murtha’s former district director, Mark Critz. The state party will choose a replacement candidate on March 8. On the GOP side, they’ve pretty much struck out on finding an upgrade from the two guys who were already running, businessman Tim Burns and Bill Russell. And now there’s growing worry that Russell — who claims to be the choice of the conservative grassroots, although mostly that’s because he’s been able to churn and burn through millions in direct mail fundraising through BaseConnect (the company known until recently as BMW Direct) — may pull a Doug Hoffman and get on the ballot as an indie if he doesn’t get chosen by the party poohbahs. Even RedState has had to weigh in, praising establishment fave Burns and warning Russell not to bolt — the total opposite of their NY-23 stance, of course, although Burns, who’s tried to reach out to the teabaggers, is no Scozzafava-style moderate.

• SD-AL: This is encouraging; even Rasmussen can’t find a way to show Stephanie Herseth Sandlin in grave peril. Herseth Sandlin, who has three different credible GOP candidates fighting it out in the primary to take her on, leads all three, two of them by double digits. Herseth Sandlin beats SoS Chris Nelson 45-38, state House assistant majority leader Kristi Noem 49-34, and self-funding state Rep. Blake Curd 51-33. In fact, these numbers are extremely close to the ones put up by PPP back in December.

• IL-LG: Well, here’s a nice solution to the Dems’ woes in trying to find a Lt. Governor candidate in Illinois: just eliminate the position. State House speaker Michael Madigan is bringing to the House floor a plan to altogether eliminate the non-job that is Lt. Governor in 2015 (and save millions). Unfortunately, that still means the Dems need to find someone to fill that slot (vacated by Scott Lee Cohen’s implosion) for one term.

• Polltopia: Nate Silver performs a nice deconstruction of the myth that won’t die: that incumbents polling below 50% in early polling are going to lose. He finds there is no consistent tendency for challengers to pick up the bulk of the undecideds. Moreover, a majority of incumbents polling below 50% in the 2006-09 cycles went on to win anyway. (It’d be interesting to extent this study, though, beyond the 06 and 08 wave years to see if it holds true in more neutral cycles.)

• AZ-Sen: The establishment is moving in to shore up John McCain’s re-election bid, as the rest of Arizona’s GOP congressional delegation endorsed yesterday (over their former colleague J.D. Hayworth): Jon Kyl, plus Reps. Trent Franks, John Shadegg, and Jeff Flake. Yesterday McCain also got a perhaps more surprising endorsement yesterday, from Grover Norquist, who’s been supportive of a lot of insurgent bids this year… but Norquist is more interested in purely economic issues and may not have much common cause with the more resentment-based social conservative politics of Hayworth.

• CO-Sen: Here’s a sign of life for the strangely low-profile Andrew Romanoff primary campaign: he just got the endorsements of two of the state’s major unions, the Teamsters and the UFCW. Michael Bennet did just vote to confirm Craig Becker to the NLRB, but the unions take issue with his lack of support for the card-check provision of EFCA. Meanwhile, Tom Wiens is offering one of the strangest excuses I’ve ever heard for his failure to get much traction in the GOP primary: there are a whole lot of Nortons in Colorado, and people reflexively will vote for any of them.

• IN-Sen: Another day, another damning revelation about Dan Coats’ lobbying past. Today, it turns out that his lobbying firm, King & Spalding, was lobbying on behalf of Bank of America at a time it was seeking patent approval for a formula that would help companies evaluate whether and how to outsource their operations to lower-overhead countries.

• NC-Sen: Richard Burr has drawn a primary challenger as he seeks his first re-election the Senate. Asheboro city councilor Eddie Burks, however, doesn’t have the kind of high-profile position that’s likely to make much of an impact. But even weirder is the nature of the challenge. You’d think he might get some traction if he reached out to the teabaggers and accused Burr of being insufficiently bloodthirsty, but instead it’s a surprisingly level-headed critique of Burr’s inaccessibility and general anonymity.

• NY-Sen: Speaking of random primary challenges, now Chuck Schumer is facing one too, from Phil Krone, an Illinois and/or Florida political consultant who was just involved in Dan Hynes’ unsuccessful campaign. Krone says he’ll dive in only if he can raise $10K in contributions before April 1; given the strangeness of his bid, even that seems kind of a high bar to reach.

• NY-Sen-B: Finally, there’s one other carpetbagging primary challenge that’s only slightly less random: that of Harold Ford Jr. against Kirsten Gillibrand. This latest discovery isn’t likely to help Ford’s case much: Ford claims that paying New York taxes has helped make him a New Yorker… except he hasn’t paid any New York income taxes. Ford has continued to maintain Tennessee residency, which is convenient, seeing as how Tennessee doesn’t have an income tax on wages. I guess what he meant is that he pays sales tax on all his New York pedicures.

• WI-Sen: Ex-Gov. Tommy Thompson sure likes keeping his name in the news. Despite his recently signing on to work for a hedge fund on agribusiness matters (and his various other private sector projects, including being a partner at DC biglaw firm Akin Gump, he’s still refusing to rule out a Senate bid. “I’m going through a process,” he says cryptically.

• NY-Gov: Looks like we will have David Paterson to kick around for at least a few months more. Despite the mounting tsunami of crap threatening to engulf him, and facing very likely annihilation by Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, Paterson has been e-mailing supporters to tell them that on Feb. 20 or 21 he’ll officially launch his bid to stay Governor. He is adopting the “outsider” mantle for his run, since, of course, nothing says “outsider” more than being the sitting Governor of New York.

• MI-03: CQ compiles a list of a truckload of different Republicans who might seek the seat opened up this week by retiring Rep. Vern Ehlers in the Grand Rapids-based 3rd. Prime contenders include state Sens. Bill Hardiman and Mark Jansen, former state Rep. Jerry Kooiman, and former state Sen. Majority leader Ken Sikkema, all of whom say they’ll decide soon. Former Lt. Gov., and gubernatorial candidate, Dick Posthumus, has ruled out a bid, and it seems unlikely that SoS Terri Lynn Land (who’d been associated with the seat when Ehlers retirement rumors popped up early last year) will run, as she might have her sights on the LG slot. While the GOP has the stronger bench here, Dems who might run include former state Reps. Michael Sak and Steve Pestka, and state Rep. Robert Dean.

• NY-20: One seat that should be attractive to Republicans, given the narrowness of Rep. Scott Murphy’s special election victory, is the 20th, but it’s proven be one of their biggest recruiting headaches. Assemblyman Marc Molinaro is the latest GOPer to decline. Jim Tedisco, who lost to Murphy in the special, shut down his account from that election but hasn’t fully ruled out another run. Murphy is already sitting on $1.4 million, which certainly acts as a deterrent.

• OH-06: The rural, Appalachian-flavored 6th (at R+2, and a negative trend from Kerry to Obama) is another district that should be a Republican target, but where Rep. Charlie Wilson hasn’t drawn a serious opponent yet. Some Dude, however, has stepped up, in the form of businessman Bill Johnson. Johnson had been considering a run next door in the 17th (where he lives) against Rep. Tim Ryan, but recently seemed to realize the 6th would be easier sledding.

• CA-LG: The confirmation of Abel Maldonado as California’s new Lt. Governor has become a bizarre clusterf@ck. First off, there’s the question of why legislative Democrats would want to keep Maldonado in his Dem-leaning, pick-up-able Senate seat instead of promoting him to the entirely harmless LG slot. Clearly the Senate Dems like the idea of getting to the magic 2/3s mark, as Maldonado’s appointment cleared the Senate easily, but then enough Dems in the Assembly voted against it that his appointment failed, with 37 voting yes and 35 voting no. Confused? Well, some would say that he needed 41 votes (a majority of the 80-seat chamber) in order to be confirmed. Arnold Schwarzenegger is claiming victory, though, and planning to swear in Maldonado anyway, claiming that there would need to be 41 votes against Maldonado for the confirmation to fail. Several election law experts say Ahnold has a good point with that, although there’s guidance from a 1988 state treasurer appointment that says otherwise. Looks like this is headed to the courts.

• Teabaggers: Ed Kilgore picks apart the recent CBS poll regarding the tea party movement, and comes to the same conclusions that I’ve been teasing out… that there’s really nothing new in the movement, and that it’s just the most conservative elements of the Republican coalition in just a particularly revved-up, radicalized mood, and with a handy new name to distinguish themselves. This is particularly seen that 62% of them have a favorable view of the Republican party, despite their vague claims to be a movement separate from the parties.