Swing State Project

Somewhat sucky news:

Less than three months after saying he would consider a run next year for attorney general of Texas, third-term U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, told the American-Statesman’s Danny Yadron on Wednesday that the AG option is no longer on his plate.

Asked if he was still mulling a run for attorney general, McCaul replied: “No, I’m running for re-election.”

This confirms an earlier statement from a McCaul spokesman. While it would have been nice to have an open seat here, Democrats fortunately have a good candidate in Jack McDonald, who has already raised over $300K and previously said he’d run no matter what McCaul decided. Indeed, the DCCC has already targeted McCaul, firing off a few radio ads over his vote against the stimulus.

And according to SSP’s analysis of the presidential vote, Barack Obama improved nicely over John Kerry’s numbers – McCain won the district 55-44, versus Bush’s 62-38 pounding. In a separate analysis of Texas demographics, Crisitunity observed that the 10th CD had the largest raw increase in Hispanic population from 2000 to 2006 of any district in the Houston or Dallas areas. That trend has doubtless continued, putting the GOP on ever-thinner ice.

McCaul, meanwhile, is far from entrenched – he won his last two elections with just 55% and 54% of the vote, running against underfunded opponents both times. I think this is going to be an interesting race.

• NY-20 (pdf): There’s light at the end of the tunnel in the NY-20 count, and as we get closer, Scott Murphy’s numbers keep going up. This morning’s BoE tally gives him a lead of 167, following the addition of more votes from Columbia, Dutchess, and Warren Counties (all of which Murphy won on Election Day).

Apparently all Saratoga County votes are accounted for, except for 700 challenged ballots, which, thanks to yesterday’s court ruling, will be counted. (While Saratoga County in general is Jim Tedisco’s turf, the Tedisco camp’s heavy use of challenges of student votes suggests that these votes may include a lot of votes from artsy Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, which one would expect to lean Democratic.)

• CO-Sen: Finally, a GOPer commits to the Colorado senate race against appointee Michael Bennet. It’s Aurora city councilor Ryan Frazier, who made his announcement while teabagging in Grand Junction. Frazier is 31 and African-American, so he brings an interesting backstory to the race, but it’s unclear whether his strength among conservative activists can overcome his otherwise low profile in the GOP primary (assuming anyone else bothers to show up).

• FL-Sen: Quinnipiac takes another look at the Florida senate race; not much has changed since last time, although one noteworthy finding is that Floridians would prefer to see Charlie Crist remain as governor rather than jump to senate, by a 42-26 margin. That doesn’t stop him from crushing in the senate primary (Crist beats Marco Rubio and Vern Buchanan 54-8-8). Buchanan leads a Crist-free primary, while on the Dem side, Kendrick Meek narrowly leads Pam Iorio (16-15, with 8 for Ron Klein, 5 from Dan Gelber, and a whole lotta undecideds).

• PA-Sen: John Peterson isn’t a make-or-break endorsement, but the former GOP representative from rural PA-05 said that he won’t support Arlen Specter’s re-election bid in 2010. He stopped short of endorsing Pat Toomey (Peterson supported Specter in the 2004 primary), but said it was time for Specter to retire. In other completely unsurprising endorsement news, the Club for Growth (of which Pat Toomey was president until several days ago) today endorsed Toomey’s bid. Laugh all you want, but Toomey will need all the financial help he can get; Specter hauled in $1.3 million in Q1 and is sitting on $6.7 million CoH.

• TX-Sen: Our friends at Burnt Orange Report have a nice graph showing Bill White and John Sharp dominating the fundraising chase so far in the hypothetical Texas senate race. (The chart doesn’t include GOP heavyweights Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and AG Greg Abbott, who haven’t taken formal steps for the race, but whose cash stashes are state-specific, putting them back to fundraising square one if they ran for senate.)

• CT-Sen: If Chris Dodd is going to win again in 2010, it’s going to be on the back of money, not popularity. Luckily, he still has lots of the former, as big-money donors aren’t being scared off by his poll numbers: he raised $1 million in the first quarter, with $1.4 million CoH.

• MN-Sen (pdf): Minnesotans would like the madness to stop, and would like to have a 2nd senator. PPP finds that 63% think that Norm Coleman should concede right now, and 59% (including 54% of independents) think Tim Pawlenty should sign Al Franken’s certificate of election right now. (This should give Pawlenty some pause as to whether or not to create further delay in the name of partisan politics, as he’s about the only person left who can drag this out.)

• MO-Sen: Roy Blunt raised $542K in the first quarter, only about half of what Robin Carnahan raised. Our JeremiahTheMessiah came up with the best possible headline for this story:

Carnahan Smokes Blunt… In Fundraising

• GA-Gov: As reported in the diaries yesterday by fitchfan28, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle dropped out of the gubernatorial race, citing health concerns. Cagle was more-or-less front-runner, and his departure leaves SoS Karen Handel and Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine to slug it out for the GOP.

• IL-10, PA-07: Two huge fundraising hauls (by House standards) from two candidates who may be looking to move up. Mark Kirk, who pulled in $696K in the first quarter, is supposed to decide soon whether or not to try for IL-Sen. (He has only $597K CoH, though, after burning through all his cash defending his seat in 2008. So he may just be raising hard in expectation of another top-tier challenge in 2010 in this blue district.)

Joe Sestak raised $550K in the first quarter, leaving him sitting on a mongo $3.3 million. Could this… plus his suddenly increased media presence, as he talks the defense budget and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell… be tea leaves that he may be the Dem who jumps into PA-Sen after all? (Sestak has previously declined, and he’s always been mentioned as an afterthought in this race after Allyson Schwartz and Patrick Murphy. But neither of them have made any moves, leaving Joe Torsella the only Dem challenger so far.)

• Numbers: California’s Secretary of State office finally released its Supplement to the Statement of Vote, heaven for nerds. Now you can look up Presidential and Prop 8 votes not just by congressional district, but by state senate or assembly district or even Board of Equalization district.

Wow.

http://www.capitolweekly.net/a…

I am not usually the diary posting type but this seemed like big news if it pans out.  Cant say Im totally surprised but Garamendi was my guy and I fully planned on voting for him in the primary knowing he would probably only garner about 10% of the vote.

Personally and politically, I really like him and kind of wished I still lived in CA-10 so I could cast a vote for him.  I met him once.  He is a large, congenial and enagaging man.

It looks almost certain now that AG Brown will take the plunge for Team Blue and easily win the Dem primary.  Either he or Feinstein but I never really thought she would enter.  Some of my more well-connected friends in the CDP seem to agree with that assessment as well.

Also, I dont see much hope for Buchanan or DeSaulnier given this event but in a low-turnout election, who knows?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

QUESTION: What do you think about the idea of secession or sovereignty for your state?

PERRY: Oh, I think there’s a lot of different scenarios. Texas is a unique place. When we came into the Union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that.

My hope is that America, and Washington in particular, pays attention. We’ve got a great Union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it.

But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what might come out of that.

This man is seriously deranged.  He is getting dangerously close to treason.

Jim Bunning has been telegraphing bad fundraising numbers for some time now, especially with his public admission last month that his fundraising was “lousy.” With the numbers he released today, we can see the full scope of “lousy:” he raised $263,000 in the first quarter, and has $375,000 cash on hand. This looks like the Bunning campaign starting to enter a death spiral: perceptions that he can’t win lead to low fundraising, which leads to perceptions that he can’t win (and certainly that’s not helped by polls showing him losing by double digits).

Also, bear in mind this is less than his potential Dem challenger Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo has; Mongiardo raised more than $429,000 last quarter (although Mongiardo will need to spend a lot this year to stay competitive with AG Jack Conway in the primary). And while you might be thinking $263K can still go a long way in a cheap state like Kentucky, that’s not quite true; Kentucky is a very inefficient state for advertising dollars, as you have to pour a lot of money into the Cincinnati and Evansville markets, so blanketing Kentucky costs more than the cost of blanketing some states with significantly larger populations.

Still, Bunning is rich as Croesus compared with fellow Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Coburn reports having raised all of $17,000 in the first quarter, and holds $57,000 cash on hand. While Coburn has been making public noises lately about being unsure about whether to run for re-election (saying yesterday that he was seeking divine guidance on the issue, as well as saying that “Being a doctor is more fun”), these numbers speak pretty loudly on the issue.

It’s time to bring ’em to Justice:

Democrat Charlie Justice will end a decade-long state legislative career to challenge C.W. Bill Young for Congress. “The decisions made in Washington D.C. more and more impact our daily lives and  that’s what drew me to public service in the first place,” said the 39-year-old state senator from St. Petersburg. “We need people in Washington that understand their decisions have real impact on the families and small businesses here.” […]

Either way, Justice says he’s in: “If he decides to retire after 40 years in Washington, we’ll thank him for his service and if he decides to run again, we’ll have a healthy debate,” said Justice, an academic adviser at the University of South Florida.

This is another major, major score for the DCCC, who hoped to lure Justice (whose state Senate district is a competitive one which mostly overlaps with Young’s 10th CD) into this race last cycle. The 10th District is one of the most evenly-split seats in the nation in terms of its partisan composition; Obama and Gore both won the district under its current lines by four and two points, respectively, while Bush won the district by a 51-49 margin in 2004.

Like Delaware’s Mike Castle, Young has routinely won re-election by massive margins, but often against unheralded and unknown challengers. Most recently, Young turned away his latest challenge from Dunedin Mayor Bob Hackworth, whose campaign suffered from being both underfunded and decidedly last-minute, by a 61-39 margin. But also like Castle, Young is getting pretty long in the tooth — he will turn 80 just weeks after the 2010 elections, and he hasn’t had to run a real race in eons. Perhaps the idea of actually needing to run a full-geared campaign will be enough to nudge the old crumb-bum into retirement.

Things just got ugly for Republican Jim Tedisco: The latest numbers from New York State show him picking up just 163 votes in his “stronghold” of Saratoga County, meaning that he still trails by 86 votes overall. Tedisco’s camp was hoping Saratoga would put him over the top, so this is a harsh blow – none of the remaining counties were as favorable to the Republican on election night as Saratoga.

Meanwhile, Dem Scott Murphy just got a very favorable ruling from a judge overseeing the case:

Judge James Brands just ruled that most of the over 1,200 contested absentee ballots in the race to replace Kirsten Gillibrand in Congress were objected to improperly based on discrepancies in their applications. This means many more ballots will be counted.

Tedisco’s team has been following the Norm Coleman playbook almost to the letter, challenging ridiculous numbers of absentee ballots (including, as you may know, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s). Seeing as Murphy’s attorneys argued in favor of counting many of these challenged ballots, this augurs well.

UPDATE: More discussion in BigDust’s diary.

I know Nate Silver already handled the math this morning as it pertains to the NY-20 race but here is an update from the NY BOE:

http://www.elections.state.ny….

For those of you who like it quick and dirty at Tedisco, the latest tally after Saratoga and Washington has Murphy by 86 votes.

All that is left it looks like is some counting left to do of absentees in Dutchess, Warren and Columbia (all Murphy counties on election night and in the absentees thus far) plus a small amount of military and overseas ballots in Columbia, Dutchess, Essex and Rensselear (all Murphy counties again on election day except Rensselear where Murphy has won in the absentee count so far anyway).

With an overwhelming majority of challenged ballots being from the Tedisco campaign and NOT included in these numbers, the math is looking awfully difficult now for Tedisco.  It looks like Murphy will finish the paper ballot count ~100 votes ahead.  Barring a judicial catastrophe I dont see how Murphy loses this one.  

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C) really screwed up in some recent comments that he made. He is making himself more and more vulnerable with each passing day.

Here is what he told a group of NC business leaders earlier this week, as reported by The Hendersonville Times-News:

“On Friday night, I called my wife and I said, ‘Brooke, I am not coming home this weekend. I will call you on Monday. Tonight, I want you to go to the ATM machine, and I want you to draw out everything it will let you take. And I want you to tomorrow, and I want you to go Sunday.’ I was convinced on Friday night that if you put a plastic card in an ATM machine the last thing you were going to get was cash.” Burr added, “I think it is safe to say the economy has not rebounded. If anything, we have gone deeper into what economists call ‘recession.’ I would tell you it’s not a recession. I would define this as a depression.”

http://politicalticker.blogs.c…

Advocating runs on the banks is a really idiotic thing to do, and I am really looking forward to getting a new Senator in 2010. I really hope that Roy Cooper will run for Senate!

What do you all think of these comments and will this impact Sen. Burr’s future at all?

This is becoming a disturbing pattern. First this:

When asked for his assessment of Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s job performance, Democratic Senate candidate Kendrick Meek dodged the question, telling the St. Petersburg Times that “I haven’t yet reviewed his work.”

And now this:

Meek said he was unaware that Obama had pledged during his campaign to lift the limits on remittances put in place under President George W. Bush.

The first quote is just idiocy and a pathetic dodge – if Meek can’t go after Charlie Crist directly now, how does he expect to take him on if Crist gets into the Senate race? The second statement, meanwhile, is part of an embarrassing attempt to pander to the hardliner Cuban American establishment in Florida, and as this blog post details, it’s not going to get Meek anywhere.

But really, none of this ignorance, whether feigned or real, inspires much confidence.