Tag: CA-AG

• AZ-Sen: So, that anti-earmark stance from Republican leadership seemed to last a whole week or so, until everybody’s attention had moved onto something else (something about sharks attacking people in airport security lines, maybe). Jon Kyl just got a $200 million earmark to settle an Indian water rights case with the government. Kyl’s defense… and one we should expect to hear a lot from both sides of the aisle… is that it’s technically not an earmark (which seems to have a profanity-style you-know-it-when-you-see-it standard).

• CT-Sen: Joe Lieberman is hinting at an independent run as the preferred way forward out of his three-possible-ways-to-lose conundrum. In a recent interview, he said “I’ve enjoyed being an Independent so I guess that’s the most natural way to run, but I haven’t decided,” as well as “I don’t meet all the requirements of either party.” Other insiders, or at least the ones Politico is talking to, say that Lieberman’s choices at this point are essentially retiring or becoming a Republican. (One reason they cite is the recent collapse of the CfL “Party,” which failed to get the 1% needed to maintain its ballot place… although that overlooks the fact that the CfL was, several years ago, hijacked by waggish Lieberman opponents).

• FL-Sen: The first announced Republican candidate for the Senate in 2012 is both a Some Dude and a familiar face: college instructor Mike McCalister. If the name rings a bell, he got 10% in this year’s gubernatorial primary by virtue of not being either Rick Scott or Bill McCollum. As for temp Sen. George LeMieux, a reported possible candidate, his current status is still “no decisions yet,” albeit “I do feel a calling to serve.”

• KY-Sen: Here’s some pointless post-mortem about Kentucky, but it’s the first I’ve heard any major player from Team Blue say that the “Aqua Buddha” ad was a net liability for Jack Conway. Outgoing DSCC Bob Menendez said his main regret was not asking for better briefings about candidates’ ads, and he cited the anti-Rand Paul ad as a particular “killer.”

• PA-Sen: The first announced GOP candidate in Pennsylvania has also surfaced, and he’s also on the cusp between Some Dude and whatever’s one step higher than that. Marc Scaringi was a legislative aide to Rick Santorum back in the 1990s, and is currently a lawyer in Harrisburg. (The article also cites one other potential GOP challenger in addition to the usual Jim Gerlach/Charlie Dent suspects: incoming state House majority leader Mike Turzai, whom you might remember weighing and deciding against a PA-04 run in 2010.) As for Bob Casey Jr., he’s running again, although his main concern for the next year seems to be upping his low-key profile.

• NY-23: After making some waves yesterday with saying he was at least considering voting for John Boehner in the floor leadership vote, Bill Owens is now just saying he was “blowing off steam” and will vote for her as long as she promises to focus on jobs. (In other words, he probably got a call from leadership explaining the consequences.)

• CA-AG: Kind of a foregone conclusion at this point, given his 40,000 vote deficit, but Steve Cooley has just conceded the Attorney General’s race, with Democratic San Francisco DA and rising star Kamala Harris the victor.

• KY-AG: Here’s a surprise: after a few weeks of hype concerning a 2011 battle royale between Jack Conway and Trey Grayson for Attorney General, Grayson suddenly reversed course. Rather than run again for SoS, where GOPers were already lining up, he apparently won’t run for anything, other than the sweet embrace of the private sector.

• Chicago mayor: One more poll gives Rahm Emanuel a sizable edge in the Chicago mayoral race. He has 39% support in a Chicago Retail Merchants Association poll, followed by Carol Mosely Braun at 12, Gerry Chico at 9, Danny Davis at 7, and His Accidency, Roland Burris, at 2. The real question here seems to be whether Emanuel can win on Feb. 22 without a runoff (which would be Apr. 5).

• AR-St. House: Here’s an interesting situation in Arkansas, where Dems still control the state House (albeit with reduced numbers) but an unusual special election is already on tap. Democratic State Rep. Rick Saunders was apparently going to be given a pass to serve another two years despite being term-limited out, because the guy who won the seat in November, GOPer Keith Crass, did so despite being dead. He beat Dem Larry Williams despite dying during the early voting period. Now Saunders says he’ll resign in early January so a special election can be held (in April at the earliest).

• Washington: It looks like all the counting in Washington is finally done, with turnout a whopping 71% (thanks to the mail-in nature of the election, which goes a long way toward evaporating the ‘enthusiasm gap’). Patty Murray wound up winning by just shy of 5%, right where UW’s polling put it, compared with the out-of-state robo-pollsters who saw a much closer race. Dems still control both chambers of the state legislature by decent (but not supermajority anymore) margins, after losing 4 seats in the 49-seat Senate and 5 in the 98-seat House. Three races where the Dem trails (Randy Gordon in the Senate, and Dawn Morrell and Kelli Linville in the House) are apparently going to recount, though, by margins ranging from 47 to 194.

• Money: The Dems, after getting outgunned on the dark money front in 2010 by a wide margin, aren’t going to be caught napping this time (and this time, unlike 2008, they seem to have Barack Obama’s tacit approval). David Brock (in his quest to become the left’s answer to Karl Rove) is busy revving up his own 527/501(c)(4) type-thing for corraling large donations from undisclosed donors. The good news: they’ve already lined up $4 million in commitments. The bad news: they’re being led by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (although maybe she’s better behind the scenes than she is as a campaigner).

• History: Here’s a great look back from Greg Giroux at Senate cycles where one party was defending more than 10 seats than the other party (as the Dems will in 2012). While the last three times this happened (2006 2008, 1986, and 1980), the defending party got hammered, many of the prior examples showed little movement one way or the other, including 1976, where a number of incumbents of both parties lost (in the post-Watergate environment) but it all balanced out to zero.

• AK-Sen: There’s yet another lawsuit coming out of the Joe Miller camp, this one filed in state court. It essentially rehashes claims he’s already made at the federal level, but adds two new allegations: voters without identification were allowed to take ballots in some precincts, and that in a few precincts handwriting samples suggest that the same person completed multiple ballots. Miller’s ultimate goal is a hand count of the entire race, which could delay Lisa Murkowski’s swearing-in past January. The question, however, is starting to arise: who’s paying for all this? None of Miller’s former friends seem interested any more: the NRSC has gone silent, and the Tea Party Express still offers verbal support but isn’t ponying up any money. Only Jim DeMint continues to offer any financial support (with a Joe Miller fundraising button on his Senate Conservatives website).

• MT-Sen: This could complicates matters for Denny Rehberg, turning this primary into an establishment vs. teabagger duel. Two right-wing groups, Concerned Women PAC and Gun Owners of America, have already lent their support to businessman Steve Daines, who has already announced his bid for the GOP nod here.

• NY-Sen: Kirsten Gillibrand has to do it all over again in 2012 (this one was just a special election), and rumors are that former Bush administration official Dan Senor, who spurned a run this time, is interested in a run next time. It’s hard to imagine, if Gillibrand could top 60% in a year as bad as this, that Senor could somehow overperform that in a presidential year.

• MN-Gov: The recount is officially on. The State Canvassing Board, whom you all got to know really well in early 2009, ruled that the 8,770 vote lead for Mark Dayton is less than one-half of a percentage point and that an automatic recount is triggered. The count starts on Monday and should end in mid-December, allowing time for swearing in on Jan. 3 (unless things really go haywire). This comes after a variety of legal maneuvering from both sides, including a fast Minnesota Supreme Court ruling against Tom Emmer, in response to his desire to force counties to comb through voter rolls and eliminate votes that were “excessively cast.” No word yet on whether the Board will honor Dayton’s request for ways to streamline the process (and minimize Emmer’s chances for challenges).

• MT-Gov: There had been rumors that Democratic ex-Rep. Pat Williams would seek the Dem gubernatorial nomination (potentially setting up a match with his successor, ex-Rep. Rick Hill), despite being 72 years old. He’s now saying that he won’t. Williams is so old-school that he used to represent MT-01, before the state got smooshed together into one at-large district.

• CT-05: Random rich guy Mark Greenberg, who finished third in the GOP primary in the 5th this year (although with nearly 30% of the vote), says he’ll be running again in 2012. Added incentive: he says he expects this to be an open seat as Chris Murphy runs for Senate.

• FL-17: Newly elected Frederica Wilson is already challenging the old ways of the House… going after the long-standing prohibition against wearing hats on the House floor. She says it’s “sexist,” saying that women’s indoor hat use is different from men’s. Wilson owns at least 300 hats, she says. (If Regina Thomas ever makes it to the House, maybe the Hat Caucus can gain some momentum.)

• MD-01: Recently-defeated Frank Kratovil seems like one of the likeliest losses to run again in 2012, especially since the Dem-controlled Maryland legislature is likely to serve him up a much Dem-friendlier district (as many of our in-house mapmakers have suggested). He isn’t saying yes yet, but says he will “consider” it.

• NH-02: Another possible re-run is Ann McLane Kuster, who performed pretty well in a narrow loss to Charlie Bass in the open 2nd. There have been lots of Beltway rumors that her run is imminent, and some are pointing to encouragement straight from the White House for her to try again.

• NY-01: We’ve essentially finished the absentee ballot count, and the news is very good here: Tim Bishop, after leading by only 15 last night, is now leading by a comparatively-gargantuan 235 with all absentees counted. However, we’re nowhere near a resolution, as attention now turns to the court battle over 2,000 challenged ballots (Randy Altschuler has challenged 1,261, while Bishop has challenged 790). Still, Bishop’s spokesperson is saying they’re “very confident” that they’ve won this one.

• NY-23: Yeesh, Bill Owens is actually saying he might vote for John Boehner for Speaker or abstain instead of Nancy Pelosi when it comes to a floor vote, saying Pelosi is too liberal. (This despite saying he voted for her, rather than Heath Shuler, in the caucus vote.) Also, not that it matters at this point, but this race wound up being closer than the Election Day count indicated: Matt Doheny picked up 1,982 previously-unknown votes in the recanvass of Fulton County, taking Owens’ margin down to 1,795 overall, and making it all the clearer that we owe this victory entirely to 3rd-party bearer-of-cat-fud Doug Hoffman.

• Odds and ends: The Fix has a massive list of people considering rematches in 2012, most of which we’ve already dealt with before (including Kuster and Kratovil, above). Other names that we haven’t listed include Brad Ellsworth (either for Gov, Senate, or his old IN-08), Christine O’Donnell in Delaware (not unexpected, since she runs every 2 years anyway), Glenn Nye, and Allen Boyd (despite his losing very thoroughly to Steve Southerland).

• AL-St. House: The inevitable realignment at the legislative level in Alabama finally happened, and happened all at once instead of slow drips. Four conservative Democrats in the state House changed to the GOP, bringing the GOP numbers up to not just a majority but a supermajority in one fell swoop. The Madison County (Huntsville) Clerk also announced her switch, too.

• CA-AG: At this point, it’s all over but the shouting in the AG race, as Kamala Harris now leads Steve Cooley by 43,000 votes (with 500K votes still left to count). While the AP hasn’t called it, LA Weekly has decided it’s a done deal.

• Chicago mayor: Roland Burris has aparently thrown his well-traveled hat into the ring for the Chicago mayoral race, as he’ll need a new job in a week or so. Supporters filed his candidate paperwork yesterday, the deadline for filing (although he has yet to officially say that he’s running). Somehow, I can only see this helping Rahm Emanuel, by further splitting the African-American vote (already divided between Danny Davis and another ex-Senator, Carol Mosely Braun).

• Redistricting: There’s been some sudden buzz about switching North Carolina to an independent redistricting commission (which, of course, has to do with the GOP seizing control of the state legislature). In what is not a surprise, though, the GOP has no interest in giving up its newfound power, saying that (despite a recent PPP poll showing wide support for such a commission) there isn’t any time to move on the constitutional amendment that would create a commission (something that they generally supported up until, y’know, this month). Also on the redistricting front, check out the Fix’s latest installment in its state-by-state series, focusing today on Indiana, where GOP control over the trifecta is likely to make things worse for IN-02’s Joe Donnelly (just how much worse, we have yet to find out)… and, if they wanted to experiment with dummymanders, possibly IN-07’s Andre Carson, too.

• Demographics: Here’s some interesting demographic slice-and-dice from the Washington Post: Dems increased their vote share in big counties (500K+) from 49% in 1994 to 54% this year, but lost even further in smaller counties, from 43% in 1994 to 39% this year. The districts the GOP won were disproportionately older, whiter, and less educated. And on a related note, check out these maps and the interesting ways they represent population density around the U.S. Note any similarities between these maps and where Democratic votes are concentrated?

Hopefully, this is the last update we’ll have to make about the Attorney General’s race!

We went through and did another county-by-county canvass, and we now have Kamala Harris (D) leading Steve Cooley (R) by 37,662 votes, 4,251,331 to 4,213,669. This count is about 100,000 votes ahead of the SoS.

Again we sync up the estimates, and my estimation of the number of unprocessed ballots differs from the UBR for the following counties:

• Butte: +222; the county reports 18,229 ballots left.
  

• Del Norte: -1,002 for votes added since November 8.
  

• El Dorado: -1,795 for votes added since November 9.
  

• Fresno: -8,687 for votes added since November 12.
  

• Imperial: -6,089 for votes added since November 6.
  

• Kern: -4,831 for votes added since November 8.
  

• Marin: -19,108 for votes added since November 8.
  

• Mariposa: -267; this is the county’s “final update.”
  

• Nevada: -4,730; the county estimated 4,730 outstanding on November 8 but has added 6,692 votes since then.
  

• Orange: -53,404; the county reports 912 ballots left.
  

• Placer: +27,956; vote counts have not been updated since November 3.
  

• Riverside: -11,300; the county reports 18,400 ballots left.
  

• San Diego: -44,970; the county reports 27,000 ballots left.
  

• San Francisco: -18,892 for votes added since November 8.
  

• San Luis Obispo: -826 for votes added since November 12.
  

• San Mateo: -26,812; this is the county’s “final unofficial results.”
  

• Santa Clara: -18,100; the county estimated 18,100 outstanding on November 10 but has added 18,174 votes since then.
  

• Tehama: -1,976 for votes added since November 10.
  

• Ventura: -6,142 for votes added since November 11.
  

• Yolo: -9,791; the county reports 0 ballots unprocessed.

Therefore, we estimate 428,179 ballots left unprocessed (compared to the SoS’ 671,594.)

The remaining territory is pretty much a wash, with our estimates having Harris gaining 47 votes to pad her margin.

As with last time, the ballots reporting have been more friendly to Kamala than before; she’s doing 0.36% better than we expected her to based on the November 13 canvass and 0.65% better than expected based on the November 8 canvass. Here are the relative swings in each county since the November 13th and 8th updates.

Movers and shakers below the fold.

• AK-Sen: Nothing has really changed with the overall trajectory of the Alaska Senate race, but this is the first day that Lisa Murkowski has been able to claim a “lead” over Joe Miller (even though her victory has become increasingly clear each day). At the end of yesterday’s counting, she had 92,164 votes to Miller’s 90,448. 7,601 were subject to challenge but counted for her anyway (and, if Miller’s lawsuit succeeds, could get reversed), but based on Murkowski’s success at avoiding write-in challenges, is on track to win with or without those challenged ballots.

• FL-Sen: George LeMieux, whose year-and-a-half in the Senate is about to expire, is leaving with more of a whimper than a bang, if PPP is to be believed: his approvals are 11/28 (with 61% with no opinion), including 14/24 among Republicans. He’s not looking like he’d have much impact in a challenge to Bill Nelson in 2012, which he’s threatened (which isn’t to say that Nelson is out of the woods, as a stronger Republican will no doubt come along). Among all the appointed Senators, he’s still faring better than Roland Burris (18/57) but worse than Carte Goodwin (17/22) and Ted Kaufman (38/33). (Oh, and if you’re still feeling like we lost out by not having Charlie Crist win the Senate race, guess again: Bob Dole! is reporting that Crist promised him he’d caucus with the GOP if he won the 3-way race. This comes after leaks in the waning days of the race that he’d caucus with the Democrats. Somehow, I expect any day now that Ralph Nader will reveal that Crist promised him that he’d caucus with the Green Party if he won the race.)

• IN-Sen: Richard Lugar made it official; he’s running for re-election one more time. Lugar, who’ll be 80 in 2012, probably has more to worry about in the Republican primary than he does in the general election, where aspiring Democrats would probably be more interested in the open gubernatorial seat.

• OH-Sen: Sherrod Brown will probably have a tougher re-election than his initial election, but it’s unclear which Republican he’ll face. The two who’ve gotten the most press are Mary Taylor, the current Auditor and newly-elected Lt. Governor, or Rep. Jim Jordan (a religious right fave from the state’s rural west), but another possibility that the article broaches is long-time Rep. Steve LaTourette, one of the House’s more moderate GOPers left. Either way, if Jordan or LaTourette were to try for the promotion, that would help the state GOP decide which of their seats to vaporize in the redistricting process (although LaTourette’s, in the northeast corner and surrounded by Dem seats, would be much harder to work with). Ohio’s losing two seats, though, and one more Dem seat is on the chopping block, especially since the biggest population losses have come in the northeast — the likeliest outcome seems to be consolidation of districts that sets up either a Dennis Kucinich/Marcia Fudge or Dennis Kucinich/Betty Sutton mash-up.

• PA-Sen: The GOP feels like they have a shot against Bob Casey (who won by a near-overwhelming margin in 2006), given the state’s turn toward the red this year. The big question, though, is who? If Tom Ridge didn’t do it this year when it would have been a gimmee, he certainly isn’t any likelier to do it in 2012. Hotline mentions a couple current suburban Reps., Jim Gerlach and Charlie Dent, both of whom have tenaciously held down Dem-leaning districts that would be prime open seat battles if they left. Failing that, the bench looks pretty empty; they cite state Sen. Jake Corman as interested, as well as talk radio host and behind-the-scenes player Glen Meakem, who cited interest in running for 2010 but decided against it.

• MN-Gov: Minnesota’s SoS (a Dem, Mark Ritchie) has laid out the timeline for the recount process. The race will be canvassed starting Nov. 23, and presuming a recount is necessary (which it will be unless something weird happens with the canvass, as Dem Mark Dayton leads Tom Emmer by less than one-half of a percent, triggering the automatic recount provision), the recounting will begin on Nov. 29.

• MD-01: Nothing like teabagger hypocrisy at work: freshly elected with a mandate to destroy the federal government, Andy Harris’s first act in Washington was to demand all the free goodies from the federal government that he’s entitled to, so long as other people are paying for them. At freshman orientation, Harris was observed expressing dismay that his gold-plated health care plan takes a month to kick in.

• NY-01, NY-25: Here are a couple more updates from overtime. In the 1st, Randy Altschuler’s lead over Tim Bishop is currently 383, but there are more than 11,000 absentees to be counted starting today, and since they’re all from one county (Suffolk), your guess is as good as mine how they break. In NY-25, Ann Marie Buerkle gained a tiny bit of ground as two GOP-leaning counties reported their absentees; she’s now up 729. Dan Maffei’s base, Dem-leaning Onondaga County, is about to start counting its 6,000 absentees. He should make up some ground, but he’ll need to average 56% among the remaining absentee ballots, while he’s only got 54% in Onondaga so far, though.

• DSCC: Dianne Feinstein told the press that Michael Bennet is, despite his previous demurrals, going to be the next DSCC chair. Does Michael Bennet know this? He’s still saying no. The rest of the Dem leadership in the Senate (and the GOP, too) was elected without a hitch today, but the DSCC job still stands vacant.

• CA-AG: Things keep looking up for Kamala Harris in California, after a torrent of new votes yesterday from Alameda County (where the Dem stronghold of Oakland is). That batch broke 18,764 for Harris, and only 5,099 for Steve Cooley, which may be a decisive moment in the count.

• Chicago mayor: Rahm Emanuel is certainly looking like the early favorite in the Chicago mayoral race, courtesy of an Anzalone-Liszt poll commissioned by the Teamsters local (who haven’t endorsed yet). Emanuel is at 36, with Danny Davis at 14, Carol Mosely Braun at 13, Gery Chico at 10, James Meeks at 7, and Miguel del Valle at 4. Now you may be noticing what I’m noticing, that there’s significant splitting of the African-American vote here, and if you added Davis, Braun, and Meeks up into one super-candidate, they’d be in a dead heat with Emanuel. Well, don’t forget that this election uses a runoff, so chances are good we’ll see a head-to-head between Emanuel and one of the African-American challengers, and the poll finds Emanuel winning both those contests convincingly too: 54-33 versus Davis and 55-32 against Braun.

Update: You can check out our spreadsheets, too. We’re about 138,000 votes ahead of the SoS.

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I was pessimistic last time about Kamala Harris’ chances, but daman09’s excellent analysis inspired me to do another county-by-county canvass of results with new projections. And as the title would give it away, things are looking MUCH better for Kamala.

Going county-by-county for the most recent updates, Harris now leads by 4,565 votes, 4,141,477 to Cooley’s 4,137,212.

While the SoS estimates 898,458 votes left to process, I estimate about 636,669, using the most recent estimates from individual counties when available and adjustments to the UBR counts where appropriate.

In the counties left standing, I’m conservatively estimating Harris’ weighted performance to be 46.08% to Cooley’s 45.14%, which should be good for another 5,993 votes.

Perhaps most significantly, Harris is performing better in the Abs/Prov/VBMs that have been added. Based on her performance as of our November 8th county-by-county canvass and and the origin of the 1,042,711 tabulated since then, we would have expected Kamala to outperform Cooley by 0.84%, for a margin of 8,707. But instead, she’s actually outperformed Cooley by 2.28%, improving her margin by 23,754.

Her swings in counties are as follows:

My estimation of the number of unprocessed ballots differs from the UBR for the following counties:

• Butte: +222, per the county update.
  

• Contra Costa: -9,411 to adjust for votes added since November 12.
  

• Imperial: -5,557 to adjust for votes added since November 6.
  

• Los Angeles: -55,762 to adjust for votes added November 12.
  

• Marin: -19,108 to adjust for votes added since November 8.
  

• Monterey: -27,126 to adjust for votes added since November 8.
  

• Orange: -43,227, per the county update.
  

• Placer: +27,956 to restore the estimates to those on November 6. Placer County has not updated its results since November 3.
  

• Riverside: -900, per the county update.
  

• San Bernardino: -7,000 per the county update.
  

• San Diego: -11,470 per the county update.
  

• San Francisco: -10,037 to adjust for votes added since November 8.
  

• San Joaquin: -32,279 to adjust for votes added since November 8.
  

• San Mateo: -26,812; San Mateo has actually added 34,601 votes since November 8; I’ve now assumed 0.
  

• Santa Clara: -9,686 to adjust for votes added since November 10.
  

• Santa Cruz: -20,592 to adjust for votes added since November 8.
  

• Yolo: -9,791 per the County; the County now lists no unprocessed ballots.
  

• Yuba: -1,209 per the County’s labeling of its latest update as “Final.”

Movers and shakers below:

I put this in the comments of the open thread earlier today, but I’m confident in my numbers to make a proclamation.

As it stands right now, Kamala Harris is up by .2%, or 14,000 votes according to the CA SOS website, which was updated at 8 am this morning.

There are still around 900,000 ballots left uncounted.

Here are the top counties, their outstanding votes, and by how large a margin each county voted for a candidate.

Los Angeles: 208,513 (Harris +13.5%)

San Diego: 71,970 (Cooley +13.8%)

Orange: 54,316 (Cooley +29.2%)

San Joaquin: 39,715 (Cooley +7.6%)

Contra Costa: 38,413 (Harris +13.3%)

San Bernardino: 36,000 (Cooley +5%)

Sonoma: 35,500 (Harris +24.2%)

Riverside: 29,700 (Cooley +19%)

Monterey: 29,470 (Harris +15.2%)

Santa Cruz: 27,905 (Harris +34.1%!)

Marin: 27,050 (Harris +31.2%)

San Mateo: 26,812 (Harris +21.6%)

Alameda: 24,500 (Harris +40.7%!!)

Sacramento: 21,621 (Cooley +2.6%)

San Francisco: 21,376 (Harris +50.4%!!!!!!)

Using some mind numbing number crunching, I project that Kamala Harris takes it home with a net 64,584 from all of the above counties combined.

All of those counties account for around 694,000 of the 898,458 unprocessed votes, or 77% of the uncounted votes.

This means that for cooley to overtake that 64,584 deficit from the remaining uncounted counties, he would have to, on average, win them by around a 32% margin.

While not impossible, I find it highly unlikely for this to occur.  The biggest margin Cooley received from any county that I can see is from Kern, when he got a 36.5% margin.  He is going to have to do better than that with outstanding counties like santa Clara that went for Harris by 18.2%, and has 8,000 more outstanding ballots than Kern.

Unless the last of these ballots go overwhelmingly for Cooley, I think Cooley is a goner, and California will have its first Bi-Racial AG.

Congrats Kamala.  

Update: Err. DCal points out a good point that Santa Clara’s reported an extra 86k votes since their last update. That means, well, Kamala doesn’t stand to gain as much. Revised, we’re saying Kamala will gain about 55,000 votes…leaving her about 7,300 short.

Hate to pull the roller coaster on y’all, but I’d rather be realistic than unrealistically optimistic.

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After combing through the individual county websites and aggregating the information with the latest Unprocessed Ballots Report (UBR), Kamala Harris is actually down 62,258 votes thanks to a large number of votes of San Diego and Orange Counties reporting beyond the latest UBR.

We’ve adjusted the UBR for the new results from each County on top of the latest SoS report – for example, the UBR lists 84,005 votes left to process in the OC, but 29,651 more votes were added in today’s OC update; therefore, we’re using 54,354 ballots left outstanding in Orange. Given all this, we actually project Kamala Harris to pick up 70,612 votes in the ballots left outstanding (again, assuming the same breakdown in the Abs/Prov/VBM ballots as the ballots already counted) – meaning she’d win by 8,354.

But even then, Harris has been outdoing that in the few examples where counties have more fully reporting. I don’t buy into the “bellwether” theory, but consider San Benito. On Saturday, Harris was trailing by 41 votes in San Benito; today, she’s winning San Benito by 226 votes. Just one example, but – if you buy the bellwether theory – a powerful one!

We’ll keep updating as more results roll in – we think a county-by-county update encompasses results more fully than just using the SoS update, and lets us better manage the timeframe issue.

Better yet, not all of Harris’ improvement is attributable to the methodology switch – by yesterday’s method, Harris would lose by only 48 votes!

Movers and shakers below:

Update: A few more counties have added results, Harris’s deficit has grown to 36,800 votes. This was a result of 85,000 new votes in Orange, 17k in Riverside, and 35.5k in San Francisco. I’ve subtracted these from the “unprocessed” totals, and the new projection says Harris stands to gain 1,500 in the remaining ballots uncounted.

However, there is a time gap between the ballots outstanding estimate and the number of votes counting – more likely than not, we’re overestimating the number of Orange, San Diego, and Riverside ballots outstanding – which of course means that Harris has more upside potential in the remaining ballots.  We’ll keep a close eye on the situation and will update accordingly as more data are released tomorrow.

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As of last update, San Francisco DA Kamala Harris (D) is trailing Los Angeles County DA Steve Cooley by 22,817 votes out of 7,659,341 counted so far.

According to the Unprocessed Ballot Report (PDF), there are still 2,342,664 ballots uncounted. Sidenote: Don’t you love Debra Bowen and what she’s done with the SoS’s office? Susan Bysiewicz, take notes!

What does this mean?

Well, we can analyze the relative composition of the remaining outstanding ballots, and the news isn’t the best for Harris.

Harris’ statewide weighted average performance for the unprocessed ballots (weighted by the number of votes outstanding) is 45.55% to Cooley’s 45.95%. This is actually a notch down from the 45.64% Harris has received in all counties so far.

This is mostly due to a large number of outstanding ballots in San Diego and Orange Counties. While LA, SF, Alameda, Santa Clara, and Contra Costa will help to offset this, they will be offset by Riverside, San Bern, and also possibly death-by-thousand-cuts in the various counties in the Central Valley.

From this – provided we assume that unprocessed ballots break down the same as the counties they are from thus far – we can estimate that Harris is on pace to fall another 9,486 votes behind Cooley.

For Harris to overcome her 23k deficit, we can also say that Harris will need to do 0.69% better among the uncounted ballots than she has thus far.

Here are the top 12 counties that will pad Cooley’s margin:

And where we estimate Harris to get an advantage:

The 34 counties we haven’t listed are expected to lose Harris another 23,531 votes, margin-wise.

Again, this analysis is fraught with assumptions, but gives us a useful picture of where things stand. We’re not taking into account any macro influences – such as the possibility of provisional ballots skewing Democratic – here, and given the sheer number of outstanding ballots – 23% of the total cast – much remains uncertain.  

• CO-Sen: It looks like the Michael Bennet camp, and his Beltway backers, are taking the recent polling surge by Andrew Romanoff in the Dem Senate primary, very seriously. Barack Obama just did a remote appearance on behalf of Bennet, for five minutes at a Bennet town hall.

• KY-Sen: Well, he finally got around to it. It was buried in the fifth and final paragraph of a press release. Nevertheless, Dan Mongiardo finally endorsed Dem primary victor Jack Conway. Despite previous rumors that he was holding out on his endorsement to get his $77K campaign debt paid off, a Mongiardo spokesperson says he didn’t receive anything in exchange for the nod.

• PA-Sen: Bill Clinton will be in Scranton to campaign for Joe Sestak next Tuesday. Frankly, that’s a really good fit of candidate, backer, and locale. I wonder if Paul Kanjorski will be allowed to tag along, though? Seems like he could use some Clinton love, too. (No, not that kind of Clinton love.) On the GOP side, Pat Toomey got some campaign fundraising help in Philly from moderate Maine GOP Senator Susan “Comrade of the Month” Collins, who seems to have forgiven or conveniently forgotten all those Club for Growth attempts to knife her in the back.

• WA-Sen: Patty Murray seems to be taking a page from the John Hickenlooper campaign in Colorado, dropping a huge amount of money right now on advertising reservations, all the way through November, while they’re still cheap. She spent $3.4 million, nearly half her CoH, on ad buys in July. She can count on her coffers being replenished, though, as Barack Obama will be hosting a fundraiser for her later this month.

• WI-Sen: Dueling ads in Wisconsin. Russ Feingold is out with a sobering ad rattling his saber at Wall Street, while Ron Johnson levels accusations of being a “career politician” at Feingold. Double NWOTSOTB.

• CO-Gov: Is there blood here in the water, or what? Colorado Ethics Watch just filed a complaint with the state bar, which could lead to disciplinary action against Scott McInnis’s license to practice law in Colorado, over his plagiarism scandal. McInnis’s former campaign manager (until last December, so he was out long before the scandal) also just asked McInnis for a refund of all the contributions he’s given him. The DGA is also starting to pour money into this race, striking while the iron is hot; they’ve plowed $100K into a new third-party group airing a new anti-McInnis attack ad. And if you were thinking that Dan Maes might turn out to be a reasonable alternative to McInnis, guess again. He ventured not just into Michele Bachmann territory (about how we’ll all have to live in tenements and take mass transit to work) but clear into UN-black-helicopters-are-fluoridating-my-water territory. And what’s the nerve center of the one-world-government’s scurrilous plot against Coloradan sovereignty? Denver’s program for public bike shares and more showers for bike-riding commuters!!!!1!

“At first, I thought, ‘Gosh, public transportation, what’s wrong with that, and what’s wrong with people parking their cars and riding their bikes? And what’s wrong with incentives for green cars?’ But if you do your homework and research, you realize ICLEI is part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty.”

• GA-Gov: This seems like a big Deal for Nathan: the third-place finisher in the gubernatorial primary, state Sen. Eric Johnson, is backing ex-Rep. Nathan Deal in the runoff. (Oddly, Johnson hasn’t said anything about it himself, but Rep. Jack Kingston, another Johnson backer-turned-Deal backer, made the announcement.) Johnson’s support should help Deal in the Savannah area, where Johnson seems to have a strong base.

• MD-Gov: I wonder if Sarah Palin is playing three-dimensional chess here, in some sort of strange gambit to help Bob Ehrlich in the general election… or just playing tic-tac-toe, and losing badly at it. At any rate, she endorsed Ehrlich’s barely-registering primary rival, businessman Brian Murphy, in the GOP gubernatorial primary. (Which, if you think about it, doesn’t jibe at all with her endorsement of centrist and likely victor Terry Branstad in Iowa instead of wingnut Bob Vander Plaats… but then, Maryland’s not an early presidential state.) Ehrlich is now publicly doing the happy dance over her endorsement of his rival, saying that it just confirms his moderate credentials for the general, where he has a shot at knocking off incumbent Dem Martin O’Malley.

• AZ-01: Rogue dentist Paul Gosar has a lead in the Republican primary in AZ-01 for the right to take on freshman Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, if his own internal is to be believed. The poll from Moore Info puts him at 30, with ’08 candidate Sydney Hay at 10, Some Dude Bradley Beauchamp at 7, and, surprisingly, former state Sen. majority leader Rusty Bowers back at 6. Gosar seems to have consolidated many big-name movement conservatives behind him, ranging from Sarah Palin to Joe Arpaio. My main question, though, is: Sydney Hay is running again?!? Why weren’t we informed? (You may remember her legacy of fail from her 2008 run.)

• AZ-03: This is at least the second time a childless GOP candidate has gotten busted for playing up his “family man” credentials by romping with children in advertising (the first time was Kevin Yoder in KS-03). At least Yoder was able to claim the kids were his nieces and nephews… Ben Quayle apparently had to borrow some of his aides’ kids for his photo shoot.

• IL-17: After seemingly no one found their internal poll from last week credible (which gave the previously-unheralded, if not unknown, Bobby Schilling a lead over Democratic Rep. Phil Hare), there’s another Republican poll out that seems to at least be on the same temporal plane as reality, in this swing district where the GOP hasn’t competed hard in a while. POS (on behalf of a state party committee… Magellan did the Schilling internal) gives Hare a 33-31 lead over the political novice and pizza restauranteur. The poll also gives 7% support to the Green Party candidate, which somehow doesn’t seem likely to hold.

• WV-01: As heartburn-inducing Mike Oliverio will probably be in terms of his voting record, here’s some confirmation that we at least got an electoral upgrade here from the guy he defeated in the Dem primary, Rep. Alan Mollohan, who had ethical clouds following him and seemed to be phoning in his campaign. Oliverio is out with a new internal from Hamilton Campaigns that gives him a 52-36 lead over GOP opponent David McKinley. With Joe Manchin at the top of the ticket in a November special election, now, too, here’s one Tossup seat where our odds seem to be getting noticeably better. (As a bonus, they find Manchin leading John Raese 62-30 in the district, which is West Virginia’s reddest.)

• DCCC: CQ looks at the DCCC’s attempts to enforce dues-payment this cycle. While their “Frontline” members (the ones in the trickiest races) are exempt from paying dues, they’re winding up giving de facto passes to a number of other vulnerable incumbents, not having had any luck at stopping them from hoarding their own cash in preparation for tough races. 88 House Dems haven’t paid any dues at all this cycle, while many others are in arrears. There’s also, buried in the article, a statement that the DCCC doesn’t plan to further extend its Frontline program, even as the number of potentially vulnerable Dems seems to keep increasing.

• California: For people who just can’t get enough campaign finance reports, the Sacramento Bee has a helpful table of filings for all the candidates for the downballot statewide races. Dems have a cash on hand lead in most races, except for two (Secretary of State and Insurance Commissioner). It’s particularly pronounced in the Lt. Governor race, where Gavin Newsom leads GOP incumbent Abel Maldonado $495K to $91K. In the very tight AG’s race (also the downballot race that’s seen by far the most expenditures), Dem Kamala Harris leads GOPer Steve Cooley $186K to $121K (and Cooley also has $170K in debt).

• Redistricting: Ohio, unfortunately, won’t be having a referendum on a constitutional amendment on the ballot in November, that would limit parties’ ability to gerrymander by requiring bipartisan support for new maps. The problem? The parties in the state legislature couldn’t agree on the exact framework for the plan. At least there’s good news on the better-districts front in New York, where the state Senate just passed legislation that will make sure that incarcerated persons are counted in their home communities, when legislative lines are redrawn next year.

• Rasmussen:

• FL-Gov: Alex Sink (D) 31%, Bill McCollum (R) 27%, Bud Chiles (I) 20%

• FL-Gov: Alex Sink (D) 31%, Rick Scott (R) 35%, Bud Chiles (I) 16%

• OH-Sen: Lee Fisher (D) 40%, Rob Portman (R) 44%

• CO-Sen: Isn’t this the second time this has happened in about a month? Tom Tancredo says something ridiculous, Republican candidate with an eye on the general repudiates the statement, then walks back the repudiation once he realizes that the teabaggers’ widdle feewings might get hurt. This time it was Ken Buck (on whose behalf Tancredo called Barack Obama the “greatest threat to the United States today” last week); he might have been helped along in his flip-flopping after Jane Norton, who’s losing the primary because Buck outflanked her on the right, started going on about how she agreed with Tancredo,.

• FL-Sen: Marco Rubio’s having a good day so far: he rolled out a ridiculously big fundraising number for the second quarter: $4.5 million raised. No mention of his CoH, though. (All eyes turn to Charlie Crist, though, for his first report after switching to an indie bid, to see whether that shrank or expanded his pool of donors.) Rubio’s second bit of good news is an endorsement from Crist’s former right-hand-man, temporary Sen. George LeMieux. (Since LeMieux reportedly has designs on Bill Nelson’s seat, and he seems to prefer running as a Republican and not on the Crist For Florida line, what else is he going to do, though?)

• NH-Sen: I know, I know, straw poll, terrible gauge of broad public support, take with salt, bla bla bla. Still, here’s a barometer of where the hardcore Live Free or Die crowd currently stands: Ovide Lamontagne dominated the straw poll at the Taxpayer Reunion Picnic, an annual gathering of those who were teabagging long before it was cool. He won 109 to 74 over Jim Bender, a rich guy who’s going the crazy viral ad route. Establishment candidate Kelly Ayotte and moderate outsider Bill Binnie were at 23 and 10.

• WA-Sen: Clint Didier, apparently aware of the stink lines of rank hypocrisy radiating off him, said that he’s swearing off farm subsidies in the future. (Seeing as how it made him look like the worst possible caricature of the teabaggers’ mantra of “I hate the gub’ment! Except when it’s giving me money for doing nothing!”) Apparently that was enough absolution for Rep. Ron Paul‘s satisfaction, as he threw his backing behind Didier this weekend.

• WV-Sen: Rep. Shelly Capito Moore is at least honest about being scared about running for Senate (almost certainly against highly popular Gov. Joe Manchin), although she isn’t couching it in terms of being afraid of Manchin per se, instead saying “I’m afraid to lose momentum that I think I provide for the state.” At any rate, she says she’ll make her (seeming unlikely) decision whether to run in the next few days, probably coinciding with the clarification on the election’s when and how, to be decided in a July 15 legislative special session.

• AZ-Gov: Ain’t that a kick in the head? State Treasurer Dean Martin, who was regarded as something of a frontrunner when he jumped into the GOP primary earlier this year, is suspending his campaign, ostensibly because he didn’t want to be a distraction to Gov. Jan Brewer as she fights lawsuits over SB 1070. In reality, Martin never really caught fire, first when rich self-funder Owen Buz Mills grabbed the not-Brewer mantle and then, mostly, when Brewer suddenly became belle of the right-wing ball when she signed SB 1070.

• FL-Gov: Bill McCollum apparently didn’t want to be touting his fundraising numbers, but they’re out anyway, thanks to a court filing pertaining to Rick Scott’s challenge to the state public financing system. At any rate, McCollum’s sitting on a paltry $800K in cash, a mere blip compared to what Scott can pull out of his own wallet. Of course, Scott could still pull defeat out of the jaws of victory, by antagonizing pretty much the entire RPOF by trying to hang ex-state party chair Jim Greer around McCollum’s neck… and by staking his pro-life credentials on a family who are loudly preferring that he shut up about them.

• GA-Gov: InsiderAdvantage, which offered its poll of the GOP primary last week, has a matching Dem poll today. The question for Dems isn’t whether Roy Barnes gets the most votes but whether he avoids a runoff, and they seem to err on the side of “no runoff:” Barnes is at 59, with Thurbert Baker at 15, and Dubose Porter and David Poythress both at 2, behind someone by the name of Bill Bolton (at 3). Meanwhile, on the GOP side, it seemed like something of an oversight that this endorsement hadn’t happened before, but Sarah Palin finally added Karen Handel to the ever-growing list of Mama Grizzlies. UPDATE: Thurbert Baker just got a top-tier endorsement, from Bill Clinton. It may be too late for that to matter much, though, because at this point Baker needs to not only win all the undecideds but peel away a significant number of Barnes voters. (H/t TheUnknown285.)

• MI-Gov: Motor City endorsements aplenty in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Michigan: Andy Dillon got the backing of former Detroit mayor Dennis Archer, who many observers thought would have made the strongest candidate had he run. Virg Bernero got endorsements from Detroit’s two House members, John Conyers and Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick.

• MN-Gov: Republican nominee Tom Emmer seems to have dug a large hole for himself with his proposal to start including tips toward restaurant servers’ minimum wage requirement (which has the effect of slashing their hourly base pay); he’s planning on doing a “listening tour” with servers as atonement. Also adding to Emmer’s worries is blowback from his Sarah Palin endorsement, which helped him upset Marty Seifert at the GOP convention but is now already being used as a cudgel in general election advertising (courtesy of Matt Entenza). Meanwhile, Entenza’s Democratic rival Margaret Anderson Kelliher is running her first TV spot; the total buy is for only about $50K, though.

• NE-Gov: Democrats in Nebraska seem to be actively considering just punting the ball, rather than trying to find a replacement candidate for nominee Mark Lakers. On the plus side, that would free up local Democratic money for other ventures (like the race in NE-02), in what was destined to be a thorough loss even with Lakers in the race. On the other hand, Tom White’s challenge to Lee Terry would probably benefit from having, well, something at the top of the ballot.

• PA-Gov: If Tom Corbett is trying to position himself as a moderate for the general election, well, this isn’t the way. He’s publicly using the Sharron Angle line of argumentation that unemployment benefits cause more unemployment, because, naturally, people would rather live on their meager checks than go out and get one of those many abundant jobs that are out there. The ads write themselves… presuming the Democrats ever get around to actually writing them.

• TN-Gov: A mysterious 527 (is there any other kind?) has emerged to pour money into the Tennessee GOP primary. There’s no word on who’s the power behind the throne for Tennesseans for a Better Tomorrow, but they’ll be advertising on behalf of Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, who’s back in third in the polls and needs a surrogate to do the dirty work of negative advertising against Bill Haslam.

• AZ-03: Jon Hulburd’s fundraising (and self-funding ability) is the main thing keeping this red-district open seat race at least somewhat on the map for the Dems; he’s announcing $250K raised last quarter. (No word on CoH.)

• CO-04: Freshman Rep. Betsy Markey had a strong quarter, raising $530K and sitting on $1.5 million CoH. In this Republican-leaning district, she’ll need every penny of it to get through this year.

• KS-04: Democratic State Rep. Raj Goyle, whose fundraising skills have put this dark-red open seat onto the map, is out with an introductory TV spot. Seems a little earlier for that, doesn’t it? We’d guess that he’s concerned about the primary (remember that there was a SurveyUSA poll a few weeks back that showed him not that far ahead of Some Dude with, well, a more ‘Merican sounding name) and not wanting to go the route of historical footnote Vic Rawl.

• MO-08: Tommy Sowers, if nothing else, is showing a lot of hustle in his long-shot bid against GOP Rep. Jo Ann Emerson in this dark-red rural district. He says he’s passed the $1 million mark for funds raised over the total cycle (nothing specific on 2Q or CoH, though).

• NJ-03: Democratic freshman Rep. John Adler seems to be putting some fundraising distance between himself and Jon Runyan. Adler raised $415K in 2Q to break the $2 million mark for CoH, while Runyan has about $500K in cash.

• NY-01: Randy Altschuler’s got a whole lotta cash: he’s reporting $1.8 million CoH. A lot of that is coming right of the Altschuler family piggy bank, though. He raised a decent $257K last quarter, but loaned himself another $500K on top of that.

• OH-16: Yikes! GOP nominee Jim Renacci must have some deep-pocketed connections from the high-stakes world of Arena Football, because he’s reporting $725K raised last quarter. (No word on CoH.)

• PA-04: This is kind of a small haul to be touting (touting may not be the right word, actually, when even your own campaign adviser calls it “not half bad”), but maybe it’s a good amount when you weren’t even supposed to have won the primary in the first place. Keith Rothfus, who blasted establishment fave Mary Beth Buchanan in the GOP primary, says he has $200K CoH (up from $157K in his pre-primary report … no word on what he actually raised).

• VA-05: Finally, here’s the delicious cherry on top of the shit sundae of fundraising reports: Tom Perriello announces that he raised $660K last quarter, giving him $1.7 million CoH. No word yet from Robert Hurt, but with $121K on hand in his May 19 pre-primary report, I can imagine it’s not in Perriello’s ballpark. The Richmond Times-Dispatch has an interesting compare-and-contrast enterprise in how Perriello and fellow vulnerable freshman Dem Glenn Nye are approaching their re-elections (Perriello emphasizing his base, Nye emphasizing his independence); clearly, based on these numbers, playing to the base can pay off, at least at the bank.

• CA-LG (pdf): We’re still sweeping up from that last installment of the Field Poll. In the Lt. Governor’s race, there’s surprisingly good news for Dems, with Gavin Newsom looking solid against appointed GOPer Abel Maldonado, leading 43-34. The Attorney General results aren’t that surprising: Republican Los Angeles Co. DA Steve Cooley has a narrow edge over SF DA Kamala Harris, 37-34.

• Illinois: It looks like we’ll never have another Scott Lee Cohen scenario again (or for that matter, probably not even another Jason Plummer scenario). Pat Quinn signed into law new legislation requiring, from now on, that Governor and Lt. Governor tickets are joined together before the primary, not after.

• Rasmussen:

• IN-Sen: Brad Ellsworth (D) 30%, Dan Coats (R) 51%

• MD-Gov: Martin O’Malley (D-inc) 46%, Bob Ehrlich (R) 47%