Senate:
• AZ-Sen: I keep saying that there’s no way Jeff Flake waltzes to the GOP nomination, but the Republican party has yet to prove me right. Fortunately, my deliverance may come in the form of rich guy Wil Cardon, who is supposedly giving the race a “very strong look” – and can self-fund.
• CA-Sen, CA-Gov, etc.: Like another failed Republican gubernatorial candidate before her, it looks like we won’t have Meg Whitman to kick around anymore. Actually, that’s kind of confusing, because of course we did get to kick Dick Nixon around quite a bit more… but not until he kicked all of us around first. Anyhow, uh, where was I? Oh yeah, the former eBay chief says she “doubts” whether she’ll run for office again. Let’s hope she means it.
• MA-Sen: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead, and Deval Patrick still won’t run for Senate.
• MT-Sen: For once, I’m hoping a Republican schedules more fundraisers – at least, fundraisers like this. Denny Rehberg just did an event in Denver that was co-hosted by BP’s “director of government and public affairs” (i.e., their chief in-house lobbyist)… on the one-year anniversary of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Good optics!
• ND-Sen: This should scare absolutely no one off, from either party: Republican Public Service Commissioner Brian Kalk, the only declared candidate to succeed retiring Sen. Kent Conrad, raised all of $32K in Q1. John Hoeven he ain’t. While we’re on the subject of North Dakota, former Sen. Byron Dorgan, who retired last year, just donated the bulk of his remaining campaign funds – $1 million – to a new charity he founded, the Center for Native American Youth. A worthy cause, I’m sure, but I’ll bet Joe Sestak would have really appreciated that extra mil.
• OH-Sen: It’s weird how the GOP went from utterly dominating last year’s Senate election in Ohio to digging out their barrel-bottom scrapers from the back of the utility shed. Ken Blackwell says he’s talking to the NRSC about a possible run… though I guess it’s not really clear if the NRSC is talking back. A lulzy quote: “You don’t just come out and build the sort of support base that I have overnight.” True – you probably need to spend two years running a crappy campaign to do as terribly as he did in the governor’s race back in 2006.
• TN-Sen: This is a little odd: Sen. Bob Corker said he “came close” to not seeking re-election this cycle. Too bad we don’t have a candidate who could make hay out of Corker’s lack of fire in the belly (a phrase he actually uses with respect to some fantasy presidential run, but seems applicable to his day job, too).
• VA-Sen: It’s starting to feel like the wingnut candidates are doing everything they can to make life easier for George Allen by piling into the clown car that is the GOP primary field. The latest is rich dude Tim Donner, whom we mentioned last month. Almost all of these weirdos claim to be teabaggers in good standing, so this almost assuredly means we’ll see some People’s Front of Judea/Judean People’s Front nonsense, rather than a united effort to stop Allen. Lame.
Gubernatorial:
• KY-Gov: Republican frontrunner David Williams raised just $450K in Q1 and has $670K on hand. (This compares to Gov. Steve Beshear, whose numbers we mentioned previously: $1.3m/$3.3m.)
• NC-Gov: PPP’s monthly home-state poll shows Gov. Bev Perdue inching up against Republican Pat McCrory, trailing 49-38 instead of 50-36. That’s very similar to a new SurveyUSA poll which has McCrory up 51-39.
• SC-Gov: The issues are a little too complex for me to try to summarize here in a digest bullet, but the link will take you to an interesting story exposing some pretty naïve political incompetence on the part of supposed GOP wunderkind Gov. Nikki Haley. One thing I’d like to remind folks of is that despite the Republican bloodbath of 2010, Haley didn’t perform all that impressively. In fact, she had the second-narrowest win out of all 20 victorious GOP gubernatorial candidates, just 4.3%. Only Rick Scott won more narrowly, and he’s Rick Scott. Dem Vincent Sheheen got almost no national attention but should have, given his strong performance in a tough state in an impossible year. If Haley continues to stumble, I think she could prove surprisingly vulnerable in 2014.