After neglecting to update the Swing State Project’s comprehensive timeline of GOP disasters for a while, I’ve gone through the backlog and have updated the list with more than a month’s worth of shame and scandal in the Republican family.
Check it out and let us know if there’s anything we missed.
Public Policy Polling (8/20-22, likely voters, 7/17-20 in parens):
Mark Warner (D): 55 (57)
Jim Gilmore (R): 32 (32)
(MoE: ±3.0%)
Nothing to see here, folks.
Bonus finding: Obama leads McCain by 47-45. PPP’s Tom Jensen looks at the numbers and lays out Obama’s path to victory in Virginia:
If blacks make up 20% of the electorate in the state as they make up 20% of the population, and Obama gets 90% of their votes he has 18%.
Assuming that another 5% of the electorate is other nonwhite voters, such as Asians and Hispanics, who tend to vote Democratic. If he gets 60% of those votes it’s another 3%, pushing him up to 21%.
That leaves the white population at 75%, and Obama needing another 29% of the vote to get to 50%. If he gets 39% support from white voters he’s there.
Obama is currently at 36% among white voters — three points short of Jensen’s magic threshold, with 12% undecided. Will he be able to bring it home?
Jame’s L. noted that Luetkemeyer’s camp had a deranged explosion response to Judy Baker having a small lead in the first general election poll of the MO-09 race.
The Luetkemeyer response is here:
“Judy Baker’s poll is like a NASCAR driver bragging about being ahead after the first lap of this weekend’s Sharpie 500, which in case Judy didn’t know is a car race enjoyed by ‘those people’ often derided by liberal Democrats like herself,” said Luetkemeyer spokesman Paul Sloca in a statement.
Of course the Luetkemeyer camp had egg on their face after swing state project pointed out that Baker cosponsored a bill that would name a stretch of road after local NASCAR racer Carl Edwards:
State Sen. Chuck Graham and state Rep. Judy Baker announced the plans to designate Route WW from Highway 63 to Olivet Road as “Carl Edwards Drive.”
Now to put the final topping on this funny story…the very driver that Judy Baker honored, won the Sharpie 500 that the Luetkemeyer camp was referring too 🙂
Florida’s District 7 should be added to the Swing State Project. The surrounding districts of Feeney and Keller were targeted, but not John Mica’s. District 7 has a small Republican advantage, but that may not even be true now, since Democrats have been outregistering Republicans by about a 5-1 margin.
Faye Armitage is a formidable opponent for Mica. Please check out her website www.fayeforcongress.com
Longtime readers of the Swing State Project are well aware that I like to keep close tabs on party committee spending, especially for those in House races. As the DCCC has begun to crank its independent expenditure shop into high gear in recent weeks, I had been toying with the idea of assembling some kind of stand-alone “tracker” of all third-party independent expenditures for House races. Egged on by Populista, I’ve finally put one together.
You can check it out here. The idea is to track “blue money” and “red money” for each contested district, bundling DCCC and NRCC expenditures with cash spent by their respective allies. As far as the visual presentation goes, it may still be a bit of a work in progress, but all the information is there.
Now, there are a few caveats: 527 electioneering expenditures, like those from Freedom’s Crotch Watch, are not filed in the same clear-cut manner as standard IEs, so we won’t be including such numbers in our tracker. (Indeed, Freedom’s Watch has been known to not file any reports at all sometimes.) I’m also not including very minor expenditures (e.g. van rentals, field supplies, or lunch for volunteers) by third parties, as the focus here is mostly on paid media campaigns. You also won’t see any expenditures made to influence primary elections, which means that you won’t see any numbers from the likes of the Club For Growth yet; we’re strictly dealing with the general election here.
So, without further ado, here it is: SSP’s House Race Independent Expenditure Tracker. Bookmark it and check it often, because I’ll be updating it daily. It will also be available as a link in the right-hand sidebar.
Rasmussen (8/21, likely voters incl. leaners, 7/28 in parens):
Ronnie Musgrove (D): 43 (43)
Roger Wicker (R-inc): 52 (52)
(MoE: ±4.5%)
Without leaners, Wicker leads by five: 47-42. The crosstabs show Wicker making some important gains over earlier polls: he now scores 17% of African-American voters (10% without leaners) and holds Musgrove to only 22% of the white vote. Even with a sky-high African-American turnout in November, that’s a winning formula for the GOP.
I don’t mean to be a Debbie Downer here, but Musgrove has some serious challenges — most seriously, a recent guilty plea from a business executive who admitted that he attempted to bribe Musgrove with a $25,000 campaign contribution in connection to a failed beef plant project — an unsuccessful business venture that left Mississippi taxpayers carrying the tab in 2003.
Now, there’s no evidence of any wrongdoing on Musgrove’s part, but this is clearly the type of smoke and mirrors game that the GOP will love to exploit. I’m not saying that this race is undoable, but it’s going to take an extraordinary amount of sweat.
SSP currently rates this race as Lean Republican.
Now that we’ve all caught Biden fever, our next question is: What will happen to Joe Biden’s Senate seat?
Well, a number of things could happen. Biden is up for re-election this year, and if he wanted to, Delaware election law allows him to remain on the November ballot. In that case, if the Obama-Biden ticket wins in November, Biden can take the Senate oath and then resign, allowing Democratic Gov. Ruth Ann Minner, in her last days in office (her term expires on January 20, 2009 — the same day as the presidential inauguration), to appoint a replacement who would serve until 2010. However, it’s not obvious to me that we want to endure the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential nominee appearing to be “hedging his bets” once again.
If Biden pulls his name from the ballot, the party would (I assume) be able to name a replacement candidate. The conventional wisdom suggests that the go-to guy to fill this slot is none other than Beau Biden, Joe’s son and Attorney General of Delaware. The younger Biden would be a strong bet to hold this seat.
Could the GOP possibly make a race of this? It’s difficult to make a case in their favor here, even if the elder Biden is off the ballot. Despite not being an overwhelmingly blue state in the most recent presidential elections (Kerry won the state by 7 points in 2004, and Gore by 13), the GOP bench in Delaware is abysmally weak. It’s so bad, in fact, that the state GOP is not even seriously contesting the open seat gubernatorial election this year.
The only conceivable way that the GOP could make a real race of this would be if they nominated the state’s at-large Rep. Mike Castle, a popular former Governor who has bucked the state’s blue trend to hold on to his House seat with ease. However, Castle is 69 years old, and suffered some minor strokes in the fall of 2006. Is he really up for six years in the Senate at this point? Castle has expressed reluctance to take on a Senate bid, but has not conclusively ruled one out, to the best of my knowledge. Still, this option seems like a long shot at best for the GOP.
The Delaware GOP does have a candidate on the ballot for this race already – conservative talking head Christine O’Donnell. With Delaware’s filing deadline having passed in July, she would have to agree to pull out of the race in order for the GOP to tap a stronger candidate – but the GOP’s recruiting prospects here do not look promising right now, especially when you consider the failed track record of NRSC Chair John Ensign this cycle.
This seat is very likely a safe hold, but we’ll have to see which path Joe Biden chooses first before we can paint a clearer picture.
Update: Another option, as mentioned in the comments but one I glossed over last night, is for Democrats to fill Biden’s slot with the loser of Delaware’s gubernatorial primary this year between Lt. Gov. John Carney and State Treasurer Jack Markell — both seem to be sensible choices, especially as Beau Biden is currently serving soon to be deployed to Iraq.
Now that we’ve all caught Biden fever, our next question is: What will happen to Joe Biden’s Senate seat?
Well, a number of things could happen. Biden is up for re-election this year, and if he wanted to, Delaware election law allows him to remain on the November ballot. In that case, if the Obama-Biden ticket wins in November, Biden can take the Senate oath and then resign, allowing Democratic Gov. Ruth Ann Minner, in her last days in office (her term expires on January 20, 2009 — the same day as the presidential inauguration), to appoint a replacement who would serve until 2010. However, it’s not obvious to me that we want to endure the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential nominee appearing to be “hedging his bets” once again.
If Biden pulls his name from the ballot, the party would (I assume) be able to name a replacement candidate. The conventional wisdom suggests that the go-to guy to fill this slot is none other than Beau Biden, Joe’s son and Attorney General of Delaware. The younger Biden would be a strong bet to hold this seat.
Could the GOP possibly make a race of this? It’s difficult to make a case in their favor here, even if the elder Biden is off the ballot. Despite not being an overwhelmingly blue state in the most recent presidential elections (Kerry won the state by 7 points in 2004, and Gore by 13), the GOP bench in Delaware is abysmally weak. It’s so bad, in fact, that the state GOP is not even seriously contesting the open seat gubernatorial election this year.
The only conceivable way that the GOP could make a real race of this would be if they nominated the state’s at-large Rep. Mike Castle, a popular former Governor who has bucked the state’s blue trend to hold on to his House seat with ease. However, Castle is 69 years old, and suffered some minor strokes in the fall of 2006. Is he really up for six years in the Senate at this point? Castle has expressed reluctance to take on a Senate bid, but has not conclusively ruled one out, to the best of my knowledge. Still, this option seems like a long shot at best for the GOP.
The Delaware GOP does have a candidate on the ballot for this race already – conservative talking head Christine O’Donnell. With Delaware’s filing deadline having passed in July, she would have to agree to pull out of the race in order for the GOP to tap a stronger candidate – but the GOP’s recruiting prospects here do not look promising right now, especially when you consider the failed track record of NRSC Chair John Ensign this cycle.
This seat is very likely a safe hold, but we’ll have to see which path Joe Biden chooses first before we can paint a clearer picture.
This is tug-of-war, which, believe it or not, was actually an Olympic event between 1900 and 1920. I think it’s high time that the IOC reinstated this fine sport at the Olympic Games. Don’t you?
If this election is a battle of tug-of-war, John McCain, after showing some recent strength, let go of the rope and fell flat on his ass yesterday. And you have to love it.
That seems to be the general thinking as of this moment.
MSNBC is reporting that their sources say it’s not Bayh or Kaine.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26…
ABC News is reporting a charter jet from Chicago to New Castle, DE
http://blogs.abcnews.com/polit…
It looks more and more likely that Biden is the guy. I actually do like the pick. Biden seems to be a good compliment to Obama. An added bonus is that we don’t lost a Senate or Governorship with Biden as we probably would if Kaine or Bayh were the pick. What do the rest of you think of the possibility of a Obama/Biden ticket?