Swing State Project

Marist College (11/18, registered voters, Oct. in parens):

David Paterson (D-inc): 51 (51)

Rudy Giuliani (R): 41 (42)

Undecided: 8 (7)

(MoE: ±4%)

So, a slightly wider margin than we saw in the Siena College poll the other day, but not too much difference. Unlike in the Siena survey, though, Paterson’s approvals have dropped somewhat, to 51-37 from 57-34. Still, not too shabby given the financial crisis.

Marist also tested Paterson against Bloomberg, but to me, that’s not even a question worth asking. Bloomsberry just spent a huge amount of political capital on his definition-of-self-serving move to extend term limits in NYC. He’s running for mayor in 2009. There is quite literally no way, no how he could do that then turn right around and run for governor. However, there is one interesting tidbit here: Paterson trailed His Bloominess by 11 in October, but leads by 4 now. Make of that what you will.

Anyhow, I also tend to doubt Rudy will even run – his “leaving the door open” statement the other day was so half-hearted. But it at least remains a possibility. And I’d love to see Paterson wipe the floor with him.

Right now we’re in a bit of a holding pattern with the presidential results by CD project. Most states haven’t yet certified final vote tallies, and some haven’t even finished counting. But the good news is that we have some preliminary numbers for the following states:

Connecticut

Iowa

Kentucky

Minnesota

New Hampshire

Rhode Island

Virginia

West Virginia

You can find these by clicking on the links in the “Calculations” column (column E) in the collaborative spreadsheet.

On the flipside, we still need links to official data sources for the following states:

Alabama

Florida

Indiana

Louisiana

Mississippi

New Jersey

Oklahoma

South Carolina

Tennessee

Utah

If you know the proper links to official results for any of these states, please enter them as a TinyURL on the spreadsheet. Even if official 2008 results haven’t yet been released (and as I say, in most states they have not), links to where you expect the official data to show up at some point would be greatly appreciated.

As always, please share any thoughts about this project in comments. Also, a couple of helpful resources from the US Census Bureau:

• Congressional District Data Tables: Contains tables of information about CDs broken up in a variety of ways, such as which counties are in which CD and whether or not they are split (example: Alabama).

• Detailed CD Maps: These offer much greater detail than the maps you’ll find at the National Atlas.

From the Washington Post:

Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) has emerged as a leading contender for Interior Secretary in the next administration, according to sources familiar with the transition.

Grijalva’s experience and background meshes nicely with some of the Obama team’s top requirements. The son of a migrant worker who grew up in Tucson, Grijalva boasts a strong environmental record and chairs the House Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands.

Choosing the congressman, who was just re-elected to his fifth term, would please both Latino advocates and the environmental community. Grijalva boasts a 95 percent lifetime score with the League of Conservation Voters, and he oversaw a federal study that linked oil and gas development on public lands with the decline in Western hunting habitat. He has also questioned the cheap grazing permits the Interior Department has leased to ranchers in the West.

The latest from the Star-Tribune with 77% of the votes recounted:

http://ww2.startribune.com/new…

Coleman is now up 210 votes, and Coleman is challenging 124 more ballots than Franken 1625 to 1501.

Ramsey County is 55% complete with a Franken gain of 40.  Even with all of the questionable Coleman challenges, I doubt Franken can overtake

Coleman in the December review.  There’s to just too much of a gap for Nate Silver’s projection to come through.

And most of the counties that haven’t reported anything yet are smaller and mostly rural–and Coleman won most of them.

So is it over for Al?

(From the diaries – promoted by James L.)

Tom “The Carpetbagger” McClintock’s lead is down to 359 votes, down from a lead that was once over 1,000 votes. The gap closed with the addition of provisional and absentee ballots from Nevada County (Brown’s strong area in the district). There are now 2 counties left to report (El Dorado and Placer), which happen to be two of the closer counties. McClintock right now has slight leads in both of them, but provisionals are expected to favor Brown at a higher rate than normal ballots.

According to this post at edhtelegraph, Brown has a decent chance of winning:

Results today from Nevada County indicate Brown is getting 6 percentage points more of the provisional votes than Tom McClintock compared to the proportion of regular and mail-in ballots.

If the remaining uncounted ballots in Placer and El Dorado Counties follow the same pattern where the uncounted mail-in ballots match the proportions from November 4 while Brown gets a 6% edge of the provisional ballots then Brown will squeak out a win. This assumes that 10% of the provisional ballots are no good.

Let’s hope these remaining ballots come out this way. I think the big question mark will be who the absentee ballots favor, while provisionals should definitely favor Brown.

UPDATE (DavidNYC): Apparently, Placer County has finished counting and Brown is now 1,793 votes back.

LATE UPDATE (DavidNYC): The Sacramento Bee says that only 4,500 ballots are left to be counted in the whole district. Brown would need 70% of those to pull even.

ANOTHER UPDATE (DavidNYC): This piece says that only 4,100 votes are uncounted and that McClintock has all but declared victory. However, in another twist, the Brown camp says that there were some 10,000 undervotes district-wide. The issue, of course, is what percentage of these were intentional undervotes.

The problem for Brown, though, is that right now, the margin stands at 0.6%, just outside the 0.5% threshhold which would mandate a hand-recount of 10% of the ballots. So we might not get to find out if there were systemic machine problems that produced false undervotes. No matter what, this one is looking extremely tough right now.

So sayeth MSNBC:

Also expected Monday — an announcement that former U.N. Ambassador and Energy Secretary in the Clinton administration, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, will be Commerce Secretary.

This would bump up Lt. Gov. Diane Denish to the top office in New Mexico, giving her a leg up over all other comers — including, perhaps, Albuquerque Mayor Marty Chavez, who is currently raising money for another run, but is mum on what exactly he’ll be running for.

In the diaries, Chad has more.

SSP’s Official Approved Movie List™:

2001: A Space Odyssey

Airplane!

Aliens

Back to the Future

Batman Begins

Dark Knight

Empire Strikes Back

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Ghostbusters

Goldfinger

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Dem

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Office Space

Pulp Fiction

Return of the Jedi

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Rahm

Star Wars

This Is Spinal Tap

Wayne’s World

What’s on your list?

Research 2000 for Daily Kos (11/17-19, likely voters, 11/10-12 in parentheses):

Jim Martin (D): 45 (46)

Saxby Chambliss (R-inc): 51 (49)

(MoE: ±4%)

The newest R2K poll of the Georgia senate runoff shows Jim Martin falling further behind incumbent Saxby Chambliss at 51-45, but Markos points out an interesting detail: the previous week’s poll, which was 49-46, found that the respondents had voted 49-47 for Chambliss in the general election (which closely mirrored the actual 49-46 result). This sample, however, finds that the respondents voted 52-44 in the general, suggesting a more Republican-leaning batch.

The fluctuation may also reflect some difficulty in pinning down who exactly fits the ‘likely voter’ mold for a runoff election: is it anyone who voted in November, or only someone who votes with regularity? Martin probably owes his close showing in the general to high turnout from young and/or African-American voters with sporadic voting track records but who were highly motivated to come out for Obama… and Obama seems hesitant to expend too much political capital on this race right now. On the other hand, with Republicans probably demoralized and undermotivated to return to the polls, and with a lot of Obama staffers deployed to the state, it’s at least possible Martin could pull out the upset through disparities in ground game.

GOP Sen. Sam Brownback is retiring from the Senate in 2010, and Dems have one big name on the bench who could actually make a race of his open seat — Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who will be conveniently term-limited out of office that same year. However, Sebelius is also being rumored as a possible Secretary of Labor choice in Obama’s cabinet, and if he makes that move, that would likely take her out of contention. Accepting a Cabinet job and quitting after, say, twelve months to run for elected office again strikes me as something that would probably be frowned upon. (Yes, I’m aware that Mel Martinez and Mike Johanns both pulled this move, but each of those gentlemen served in Bush’s Cabinet for nearly three years each.)

Assuming that Sebelius doesn’t run (for whatever reason), is there anyone on the Dem bench who could make this race interesting? I have my doubts, but anything is possible. On the GOP side of the aisle, 1st CD Rep. Jerry Moran is running, and 2nd CD Rep. Todd Tiahrt could very well join him in a few months. Our best hope here is for a contentious and divisive Republican primary. Don’t let us down, Todd!

As for the Governor’s office, it seems likely that Sam Brownback will run for the seat himself. Are there any Dems who have a prayer against him? Of all the term-limited Democratic gubernatorial seats up in 2010, this one may be the likeliest to slip back into GOP hands.