Swing State Project

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research (4/28-30, likely voters):

Robin Carnahan (D): 53

Roy Blunt (R): 44

Robin Carnahan (D): 54

Sarah Steelman (R): 42

(MoE: ±3.5%)

Democracy Corps has more:

After voters hear profiles of each candidate, Carnahan maintains a 7-point advantage over Steelman and a 9-point advantage over Blunt. After attacks on each candidate, Carnahan remains above 50 percent against both Republicans, and leads Blunt by 7 and Steelman by 6. At this early and uncertain stage, Carnahan starts off the contest with a strong personal and professional standing that puts her in a position to defeat either potential opponent. At the same time, it appears as if Steelman may be the tougher foe with a stronger profile than Blunt and the potential to run a fresh outsider candidacy that Blunt cannot offer.

Carnahan also enjoys a 46-22 favorability rating, and 87% name recognition among likely voters. Blunt, at 82% recognition, isn’t exactly winning any popularity contests with his 33-27 favorability score. Steelman, an ex-state Treasurer, has more room for growth with just 22-13 rating but only 51% name recognition.

Perhaps most interesting is the fact that, despite narrowly supporting John McCain last year, Missouri voters would prefer a Senator who supports Barack Obama’s agenda as opposed to yet another Republican drone seeking to provide false “balance” to DC:

President Obama provides a slight boost to Carnahan, even in a state he failed to carry, with a 56 percent job approval rating (compared to 58 percent nationally) and voters preferring, by a 49 to 40 percent margin, a senator who will mostly support Obama’s agenda to get things done rather than one who will mostly oppose his agenda to provide balance.

While it’s still very early in the game, this poll is further proof that Carnahan is one of the DSCC’s strongest recruits this cycle.

(Hat-tips: conspiracy, Taegan, and Jeremiah)

I’m putting this in the diaries because it’s a “meta” topic – but it’s still a very important one. I love the Swing State Project. I really do. I’ve been maintaining this site (often with all kinds of help, but sometimes on my own) for over five years. That’s an eternity in blog time.

I love this site because it’s focused – sharply focused – on a niche I find endlessly interesting and entertaining. For partisan political junkies, the horserace is the sine qua non of political change. Unless you elect the right guys and keep them there, you’ll never pass the bills you want passed, issue the regulations you want issued, appoint the judges you want appointed. It’s the alpha of whatever omega we’re all hoping for.

I also love this site because it’s a calm, civil place free from almost all of the incessant holy wars that almost any site with decent traffic regularly experiences. People here tend to keep their eyes on the prize. They analyze the horserace dispassionately and with good humor. They avoid the hot-button issues that produce a lot of heat and precious little light. They make this the kind of place that makes you feel smarter after you’ve finished reading.

We’ve worked really hard over the years to set the tone and keep things this way. Almost all the members of this community appreciate this, respect this, and maintain the calmness and civility this blog is known for.

But lately, we’ve seen conversations derail far too often. And it’s really disappointing to me. This is the Swing State Project. We talk about the horse race. Don’t get me wrong – there are a ton of issues that are important to me, whether it’s healthcare, the environment, gay marriage, or Employee Free Choice. There are also a ton of places I can discuss them to my heart’s content.

Just. Not. Here.

The main reason why people come to this site is to geek out about polls. The reason people keep coming back is because of the friendly, welcoming atmosphere. They know that there are a zillion-and-one other blogs out there for discussing any topic under the sun. SSP is for just one of them.

So, enough. Do not be this guy. Don’t take the bait. Don’t get sidetracked. This site is for one topic only. We like it that way, and so do you.

We regularly come by polls at SSP that are either dodgy, dull, or both. While we don’t intend to give them all air time, enough have blasted out of the circus cannon in the last week to justify this roundup. Here’s what we’ve got:

• IL-Sen: Some anonymous Republican outfit leaked a poll to Lynn Sweet, but only offered some transparently selective questions – two Mark Kirk head-to-heads that showed him tied with Alexi Giannoulias and Chris Kennedy, son of RFK. There’s also a Dem primary poll which shows Jan Schakowsky leading the pack with all of 20%. Nothing (released?) on Lisa Madigan.

• NH-Sen: Why is it that universities in the Granite State keep polling Cloud Hampshire? Dartmouth is the latest offender, ginning up a 32R-28D sample (real numbers: 29D-29R). Still, Paul Hodes leads John Sununu 38-35, though he somehow has much lower numbers against Charlie Bass, 31-30. No way the Bassmaster inspires a seven-point dither.

• NY-Gov: Quinnipiac’s latest poll is just fine, but there’s really nothing new to see here: Paterson gets pounded by Cuomo and Rudy. Same old. There is one notable datapoint: Cuomo’s lead against Giuliani has slipped from 53-36 to 47-41. The pollster offers no real explanation for this, and I’d personally like to see confirmation elsewhere.

• NYC-Mayor:  Marist’s newest survey is almost identical to their last, with Bloombo leading Weiner 50-36 and Thompson 51-33. Weiner really needs to outright declare that he’s not running for Thompson to have any shot, but just the other day he said the mayor’s attacks on him have made him “more inclined to run.” Guys, the election is just six months away. Quit wasting time.

• OK-Gov: Two polls for ya here. First, a company called SoonerPoll pushed out a GOP primary survey with a sample size of just 139. That’s an MoE over eight. Try again, folks. FWIW, it had Mary Fallin leading JC Watts 45-28. Perhaps to counter this news, a Republican company called Wilson Research Strategies released a poll showing Watts up 39-36. This one at least had a respectable n of 500, though it seems no one (including Wilson) has explained who paid for this poll.

UPDATE: Chris Wilson of Wilson Research writes in:

To follow up on your post regarding who paid for our poll, I did.  We had another survey in the field and I paid to add the GOP primary questions on there simply for the purposes of interest.

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For reasons that remain unclear to me, the GOP has rushed to embrace Twitter as the tool that will lead them out of the wilderness. (Maybe it’s because it’s a medium that not only doesn’t require you to have thoughts that take up more than 140 characters, but that doesn’t even allow them.) Nevertheless, over its short lifetime, the GOP’s infatuation with Twitter seems to have produced more petard-hoistings and outright FAILs than it has victories for the GOP’s twits:

• the time errant tweets scuttled a GOP plan to flip a Dem to take control of the Virginia Senate,

• House Intelligence ranking member Pete Hoekstra twittering away his positions in Iraq,

• Wayne Mosely‘s recent hilarious overselling of his campaign,

• Joe Barton‘s hubris over what he perceived as his takedown of Energy Secretary Steven Chu followed by his twittering away with catty remarks like a bored teenager during the SOTU, and

• somebody’s decision to direct the entire #NY20 feed onto Jim Tedisco‘s website, Dem press releases and all.

Well, we have an incident that may beat all of those: Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff accidentally announced his own candidacy for the GOP Senate nomination on his Twitter account, apparently thinking that he was just texting to an acquaintance instead. (His account has been scrubbed, but the memory lives on, hewn in the living rock of screen capture.) According to the Salt Lake Tribune:

“I’m announcing I’m running at 12,” Shurtleff wrote in part of a series of garbled messages, called tweets on the digital networking system.

In another he said he would have “all of the legislative conservative causcus (sic) and other senators and representatives there endorsing me. Time to rock and roll!”

Shurtleff later amended his statement to say that he was still deciding, and would make a formal announcement regarding his plans on May 20.

So, all’s well that ends well… uh, wait, what? There’s a competitive Senate race in Utah? Don’t they already have Bob Bennett? It’s true: with Shurtleff’s, um, entry into the race, it’s a major primary challenge to Utah’s long-serving (since 1992) junior senator. No one would mistake the uncontroversial Bennett for a moderate, but there’s enough rabid conservatism in Utah that Bennett’s vote for the bailout bill last year (and his unforgivable willingess to occasionally engage his Democratic colleagues in productive conversation) are apparently justification enough for a challenge from the very right.

Utah is also enough of a one-party state that primary challenges within the GOP are the only way for ambitious, restive younger members to climb the ladder. That was what happened last year in UT-03, where young movement-conservative Jason Chaffetz picked off longtime establishment Rep. Chris Cannon.

There’s at least an outside shot of that same thing happening here, and that’s partially due to Utah’s weird nominating system. GOP candidates go through a May 2010 nominating convention, where ballots are taken repeatedly with the lowest-scoring candidate removed after each round, until two men remain, both of whom advance to the primary… but if any candidate gets more than 60% of the vote at any point, he not only wins the nomination but there isn’t even a primary election. When Chaffetz won the nominating convention in 2008 (although not clearing the 60% bar), that was a clear indicator that he was the man to beat going into the UT-03 primary.

If Shurtleff is correct about having locked down the support of the conservative wing among the state legislators, he may have a shot at winning it outright at the state convention. At any rate, the convention looks like it’ll be hotly contested, and one wonders whether Bennett can survive the primary even if he makes it through the convention; I wonder if the same thing happened in Utah last year (where Obama dramatically improved on Kerry’s numbers, albeit still losing badly) as in Pennsylvania, where a share of the moderates (who Bennett would need to win the primary) threw up their hands and became Dems, leaving behind a more purely distilled primary base.

It gets even more complicated than that, as two other Republican candidates are sniffing around the race: Tom Bridgewater, a former top McCain aide, also announced on Tuesday (by Twitter, natch), that he was going to drop his candidacy for state GOP chair and instead form an exploratory committee to run against Bennett. (Bridgewater failed in 2006 and 2008 to win the GOP primary for the right to lose to Jim Matheseon in UT-02; he’s also an investment partner of… get this… Neil Bush, the Bush brother who’s too corrupt to be a viable candidate for office.) Then there’s also David Leavitt, the former Juab County Attorney (and brother of former governor Mike Leavitt) who was talking up his candidacy for many months but hasn’t been heard from recently. (As first reported by Senate Guru, Dems have a viable, or at least well-known, candidate in the race, Sam Granato, the chair of the Utah Liquor Control Commission and owner of a deli chain.)

So, with the FL-Sen, MO-Sen, and KS-Sen 2010 primaries turning into establishment vs. movement conservative free-for-alls (and with the plug having been pulled on that same battle in PA-Sen), it looks like UT-Sen is turning into one more presto log on the hellfire as the GOP finally has its long-promised battle of Armageddon for the party’s heart and soul.

• IL-Sen: Tempted by Lisa Madigan’s titanic poll numbers against all comers, and her public statement of reconsidering the Senate race, the DSCC has started actively courting Madigan to get into the Senate race. This news comes from Madigan herself, who still maintains that her main focus is the governor’s race (but, if you read the fine print, seems to be firing warning shots across Chris Kennedy’s bow to keep him from jumping into the Senate race). Madigan’s interest can’t be good news for Alexi Giannoulias, especially as concerns over his handling of the state college savings program are taking a bit of the bloom off his rose.

• FL-Sen: Movement conservatives are tying themselves in knots trying to decide how to react to apostate Charlie Crist’s entry into the Senate race in Florida. The Club for Growth gave a tepid reaction, saying that Crist can still redeem himself by opposing the tax hikes proposed in the new state budget. On the other hand, Grover Norquist, the CfG’s patron saint, sounded a note of realpolitik, saying that Crist may be the best candidate “in Florida.” The conservative blogosphere, however, isn’t giving an inch, trying to organize a boycott on giving funds to the NRSC after John Cornyn weighed in on Crist’s behalf.

• MN-Sen: Norm Coleman is getting buried under legal bills, and not all of them are related to his tiresome contesting of Al Franken’s election. He just requested for FEC permission to start tapping his campaign funds for defense attorney fees related to allegations that sketchy Coleman benefactor Nasser Kazeminy was funneling payouts to Coleman through Coleman’s wife. Would GOP donors be willing to keep funding Coleman if they knew their donations were going to his defense attorneys and not the futile Franken fight? That hasn’t stopped Coleman’s Senate friends from continuing to solicit donations for him, as compiled in this video.

• MO-Sen: Rep. Roy Blunt pulled down a couple of expected but important endorsements in his quest to become Missouri’s next Senator: Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, the last member of Missouri’s House Republicans to get behind him, and Sen. Kit Bond, whose seat Blunt is looking to fill.

• OH-15: Ohio voters may get the chance to add even more Steves to their House delegation. Former GOP state Sen. Steve Stivers, who narrowly lost the open seat race in OH-15 to Mary Jo Kilroy last year, is contemplating another shot at the race, with lots of urging from John Boehner. (Ex-Rep. Steve Chabot is already committed to a rematch against Rep. Steve Driehaus in nearby OH-01.)

• SC-02: Speaking of rematches, backbench GOP Rep. Joe Wilson will have to face off again versus Iraq vet Rob Miller, who held Wilson to a surprising 54-46 margin in 2008 without DCCC help. Miller should be able to count on a higher-profile run this time.

• Mayors: City councilor Jim Suttle squeaked past Republican Hal Daub (former mayor and Representative) to hold the open Omaha mayor’s seat for Democrats. (The position is officially nonpartisan, but the race was fought along clearly partisan lines, which favored Suttle as Democrats hold a 44-33 registration edge within the city.) Suttle won by 1,500 votes, by a 51-49 margin.

In a statement:

Today, I’m announcing I will be a candidate for Governor of Florida in the November 2010 election, and put my business experience and know-how to work restoring our economy.

This is great news for Florida Dems – this seat instantly rockets to the top of our big-state pickup lists. As such, the Swing State Project is moving this from a Safe R “Race to Watch” to Tossup.

Democrats have scored a legit recruit to take on imperiled GOP Rep. Dan Lungren. From the Sacramento Bee:

Gary Davis, first-term city councilman for Elk Grove, said he will formally announce his candidacy today for the 3rd Congressional District seat held by Republican Rep. Dan Lungren of Gold River.

Davis, who served as Elk Grove mayor in 2008, led a push for greater citizen involvement in city decision-making after his election to the council in 2006.

As a Democrat, he must win in the 2010 California Democratic primary to face Lungren in the general election.

Davis said he began considering a run for the federal seat in mid-2008 after Lungren declined to transmit $11.6 million in funding requests from the city to the subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations for consideration. At the time, the congressman’s staff said it was determined that Elk Grove’s requests were not likely to win approval.

Davis said his final decision to run came in recent weeks after Lungren voted against a bill to authorize grant money to put more cops on the street.

He called running “the right thing to do.”

Lungren’s 3rd District, once a GOP bastion that went for Bush by 17 points in 2004, has seen some pretty dramatic demographic changes in recent years. Much of its new growth has come from minority demographics, and that sea change is making its mark on the district’s voter registration composition.

By the end of 2004, Republicans held a voter registration advantage of 169,464 to the Democrats’ 139,848 in the 3rd District. Since then, the district has both hemorrhaged Republicans and added Democrats to its voter rolls; while Republicans still outnumber Democrats here, the margin has been cut to 161K-153K. The cherry on top, of course, was Barack Obama’s slim win of the district’s presidential vote last November, while Lungren himself only won his race by 5.5% against Democrat Bill Durston (who has opted not to seek a rematch this cycle).

Davis will still have to prove that he’s got chops, but with a base in the district’s major population anchor, he looks good on paper — and the broader political winds appear set to give him a fighting chance in 2010.

And this is what Roll Call found:

Well, for starters, Ball was accused of stalking a former girlfriend, who got a temporary order of protection against him. He’s been accused of posting on the Web misleading photographs of an encampment of illegal immigrants in his legislative district. A dead goat was found recently in his front yard – the work, Ball believes, of Salvadoran gangs who oppose his tough anti-immigration stance – and he’s been sleeping with a 12-gauge shotgun under his bed ever since. And until recently he has been in a vicious blood feud with his political enemies – who by the way, happen to be fellow Republicans.

Oh yes, Ball was also accused of sexually harassing a former Assembly aide. Details of this are scant on the Web, but in his conversation with Roll Call, which borders on the surreal at times, Ball dutifully provides some. The woman, he says, was put up to it by the establishment Republicans who were waging jihad against him. And the bottom line, from his point of view, is that the Assembly Standing Committee on Ethics and Guidance “cleared” him.

Which is technically true. On Oct. 20, 2008, the committee issued a letter – which is available online – saying an investigation into the accusation found that a violation of the Assembly’s Sexual Harassment/Retaliation Policy “was not established.” The committee also makes it a point to say that the statute of limitations on the woman’s accusations had run out, so the Assembly couldn’t have taken any action anyway.

A clean exoneration? Ball likes to think so. Google him – and judge for yourself.

Maybe he should just shut up now.

Is state Sen. Dan Gelber considering bailing on the Democratic primary for Senate now that uber-popular Gov. Charlie Crist has made his candidacy official? The St. Pete Times has a teaser:

Certainly a lot of Florida Democrats want to avoid divisive primaries and Dan Gelber would be a natural candidate for attorney general, but the Miami Beach Democrat says he remains a U.S. Senate candidate, for now.

“I’m not shutting any doors,” he said about an A.G. run, which unlike the US Senate, would require him to resign his state senate job.

If Gelber, himself a former federal prosecutor, decides to run for state attorney general instead, he will likely face a competitive primary. Dave Aronberg, one of Gelber’s caucus-mates, says that he will run for the job if incumbent AG Bill McCollum (R) runs for Governor, which seems likely.

UPDATE: Perhaps surprisingly, Dem Rep. Ron Klein says that he’s not shutting any doors, either, on a Senate run.