• AZ-Sen: One more endorsement for John McCain, as the GOP establishment circles the wagons around him in the face of a primary challenge from J.D. Hayworth. Today, it was former presidential rival Mitt Romney's turn to boost McCain.
• FL-Sen: Rasmussen follows up with a look at the Senate general election in Florida, and pretty consistent with its last few polls, gives double-digit leads to both Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio over Democratic Rep. Kendrick Meek. Crist leads 48-32, while Rubio leads 51-31. It's looking dicier for Crist to make it to the general, though, and that's reflected with an increasing number of staffers seeing the handwriting on the wall and bailing out. Political director Pablo Diaz announced his departure, and new media consultant Sean Doughtie is already out.
• IN-Sen, IN-08: Dem Rep. Baron Hill, still apparently mulling a Senate bid, says that he probably will make a decision "this week". Meanwhile, presumptive Dem nominee Brad Ellsworth has officially removed his name from the 8th CD Democratic primary ballot, leaving state Rep. Trent Van Haaften as the consensus Democratic choice. (J)
• MA-Sen: Unless you were under a rock yesterday, you know that the Senate jobs bill cleared the cloture hurdle with the aid of five Republicans, most notably Scott Brown, who actually seems to be thinking ahead to getting re-elected and, in doing so, has royally pissed-off his nationwide base of teabagging donors. On top of that comes another revelation that ought to further take the bloom off his status as living embodiment of angry-white-guy rage: that truck that signified he was an average blue-collar guy? Turns out he owns it in order to haul his daughter's horse.
• NV-Sen: One more data point in the Nevada Senate race, this one not looking so good for Harry Reid. Research 2000 polls the race again, this time on behalf of the PCCC, and finds Reid trailing Sue Lowden 53-39 and Danny Tarkanian 54-40. The real point of the poll, though, is to try to show him that his support would go up if he successfully got a public option into the health care reform bill, with 31% saying they'd be likelier to vote for him if so (with 15% saying less likely and 51% saying no difference). Bear in mind that this poll, unlike the interesting POS poll from yesterday, doesn't factor in the sudden emergence of a 3rd party Tea Party option.
• CT-Gov: After some brief flirtations with the idea, ex-Rep. Chris Shays has decided not to run for Connecticut governor after all, saying he couldn't make it work financially. Although he didn't address the also-rumored possibility of running again in CT-04, the same logic may apply there too.
• FL-Gov: The seeming dwindling of the Alex Sink campaign continues apace, at least if you go by Rasmussen's trendlines. Republican AG Bill McCollum is up to 13-point lead against the Democratic CFO, 48-35.
• GA-Gov: More Rasmussenny goodness in neighboring Georgia, where they take their second look at the general election in the gubernatorial race. While Democratic ex-Gov. Roy Barnes led several of the GOP contestants in the previous Rasmussen poll, trailing only Insurance Comm. John Oxendine, this time he doesn't fare as well. Barnes loses to Oxendine 45-37, to Rep. Nathan Deal 43-37, to SoS Karen Handel 45-36, and ties state Sen. Eric Johnson 37-37.
• IL-Gov: The GOP primary contestants are still waiting for the last ballots to trickle in today, the last day for counties to submit their numbers to the state. (The state has until March 5 to announce official results.) Estimates last week were that there were fewer than 2,000 votes, mostly provisional votes, to count. State Sen. Kirk Dillard, currently trailing by a little more than 200 votes, doesn't plan to make a decision on whether to concede or keep fighting until after the 5th. On the Democratic side, the search for a Lt. Governor goes on. Pat Quinn had publicly said that his top choice would be current Deputy VA Secretary Tammy Duckworth, but she has taken herself out of consideration today.
• MI-Gov: Looks like Genesee County Treasurer Dan Kildee is in the gubernatorial race for the Democrats; he's skipping right over the exploratory phase and filing as a candidate for governor. He joins Lansing mayor Virg Bernero and state Rep. Alma Wheeler Smith, with state House speaker Andy Dillon likely to enter soon.
• PA-Gov: State Sen. Anthony Williams didn't meet his very high $4 million fundraising bar, but he seems to feel heartened enough by the $2 million he has to officially pull the trigger on a gubernatorial run. With Chris Doherty and Tom Knox both out of the Democratic field now, it seems like there's room for one more SE Pennsylvania candidate in the field; Williams, from Philadelphia, will be the only African-American in the race.
• WI-Gov: One more Rasmussen gubernatorial poll to look at, featuring (surprise!) the Republican in the lead. Milwaukee Co. Exec Scott Walker leads Democratic Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett 49-40, while ex-Rep. Mark Neumann has a much smaller lead over Barrett, 44-42. That's actually a smidge better than last month's Rasmussen poll.
• AR-03: State Sen. Cecile Bledsoe got the endorsement of one of her predecessors in the 3rd, ex-Rep. and former DEA Director Asa Hutchinson. A wide cast of characters, including Rogers mayor Steve Womack, is either already in the hunt for the GOP nod or considering it, in this dark-red district.
• AZ-05: Rep. Harry Mitchell can probably consider this to be good news: another divisive Republican primary, which helped him to a comfortable victory in 2008, is brewing this year. Former state Rep. Susan Bitter Smith jumped into the GOP field yesterday, which pits her in a rematch against former Maricopa Co. Treasurer David Schweikert (who won the 2008 primary). Businessman Jim Ward and his ability to self-fund is in the mix too, as something of a wild card.
• AZ-08: State Sen. Jonathan Paton has resigned from the state Senate, in order to focus full-time on running against Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the 8th. He leaves behind one piece of legislation underway that's actually a pretty cool idea: instituting "question time," a la the UK's parliament, where the Governor has to show up for a biweekly grilling in front of the legislature. Paton becomes the third Republican state Senator to resign in the span of a few weeks, with Pam Gorman and Jim Waring both having bailed out to pursue the open seat in AZ-03.
• FL-24: Former Ruth's Chris Steakhouses CEO Craig Miller went ahead and got into the GOP field in the 24th, despite already having taken on some damage from preemptive salvos fired by the DCCC over statements opposed to stronger drunk-driving laws. Potentially self-funding Miller has become the NRCC's new fave in the race, after state Rep. Sandy Adams and Winter Park city councilor Karen Diebel have floundered at fundraising.
• FL-25: Joe Garcia, the Democratic 2008 candidate who almost knocked off Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, met with the DCCC's Chris Van Hollen yesterday. This only serves to increase speculation Garcia will try again, now that the 25th is an open seat. The DCCC has also been interested in Miami-Dade Co. state's attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle.
• KS-03: Republican State Sen. Nick Jordan, who lost in the 3rd to Democratic Rep. Dennis Moore, looks to be on track to succeed the retiring Moore. Jordan's own internal poll from POS shows him ahead of state Rep. Kevin Yoder 27-9, with former state Rep. Patricia Lightner and Charlotte O'Hara both at 5 (leaving about half of the voters undecided). Jordan's poll didn't look at the general, but there's nothing to see there yet, seeing as how the Dems haven't, um, found an interested candidate yet.
• MA-10: In the event of a retirement by Rep. William Delahunt, state Senate majority leader Therese Murray says she won't try to succeed him. On the GOP side, possible candidate ex-Treasurer Joe Malone may come with more liabilities than were initially apparent when he first started touting himself for the race. After Malone's tenure ended in 1999, it was discovered that several of his top aides had stolen over $9 million from the state. Malone himself was never accused of being involved, but reminding voters about it will inevitably lead to questions about his judgment.
• NM-02: Ex-Rep. Steve Pearce has released an internal poll performed on his behalf by the Tarrance Group that gives him a small lead over Democratic Rep. Harry Teague, 48-44. The good news for Teague is that R beats D in a generic ballot test 47-37, showing that the conservative Teague overperforms the Democratic brand despite his vote in favor of cap and trade in this heavily oil-dependent district.
• NY-01: Despite the NRCC's seeming preferences for rich guy Randy Altschuler, he's already in a difficult primary, and now he may be facing a three-way contest with a local elected official too. State Assemblyman Michael Fitzpatrick says he's exploring the race.
• OH-06, OH-17: Ex-Rep. Jim Traficant didn't meet the filing deadline to file as a Democrat for any race in Ohio, but now he's saying that he's planning to run as an Independent instead (which would require filing by early May). He's still not saying where he's going to run, although neither of the two possibilities look terribly promising: either the strongly-Democratic 17th (which he used to represent), or the swingy 6th, where he'd have to introduce himself to most of the voters
• PA-06, PA-07: Here's a big get for Manan Trivedi, as he seeks the Democratic nomination in the 6th. He got the endorsement of the Chester County Democrats. With Trivedi already strong in Berks County and Doug Pike strong in Montgomery County, suburban/exurban Chester County is somewhat the pivotal county in the district. (They also endorsed Bryan Lentz over his minor primary opposition in the 7th.)
• PA-12: This is another solid break for the Dems in special election in the 12th: Republican businessman Mark Pasquerilla, with deep pockets, seemed to be one of the few GOPers who could make this race competitive. Something of a John Murtha ally, though, he had previously said he wouldn't run if Joyce Murtha got in. She didn't, but Pasquerilla still didn't bite; instead, he's endorsing Murtha's district director, Mark Critz, who announced his candidacy yesterday. This basically moves the GOP back to square one, with the candidates who were already in place for the regularly scheduled election: businessman Tim Burns (who doesn't seem quite as able to self-fund), or veteran/BMW Direct frontman Bill Russell.
• WV-01, WV-03: Worries have been emanating out of West Virginia's governor Joe Manchin about the re-election prospects of Reps. Alan Mollohan and Nick Rahall, who despite their no votes on cap-and-trade often get tagged as not being sufficiently pro-coal. The United Mine Workers have no trouble supporting the duo, though; they endorsed both of them this weekend.
• DSCC: There have been some rumblings about DSCC chair Bob Menendez's lackluster ways, at least by comparison to his manic predecessor, Chuck Schumer. Here's a telling quote:
"Chuck - wow - he would call all the time, three, four times a week, when he needed something, but I don't ever hear from Menendez unless I initiate the contact," said a Washington-based donor who has bundled tens of thousands of dollars in contributions to the committee. "You just don't have the same level of energy from Bob; he just doesn't push you like Chuck would," the source added. "And that makes it a lot easier to say no."
• DCCC: The DCCC is trying to get some mileage out of fanning the flames in some of the most divisive GOP primaries between the GOP establishment and teabagger-powered movement conservatives (which they're cheekily calling "Palin's primaries"). Targets include MS-01, VA-02, VA-05, NH-01, CA-11, and TN-08.
• Polltopia: Mark Blumenthal takes another look at Rasmussen, asking if they've been "flooding the zone" and thus shaping the overall narrative by sheer numeric dominance of the data that get released. (Sound familiar? He gives a shout-out to a diary here by our own spiderdem that first raised the point.) It's quite true that Rasmussen has done many more Senate polls this cycle than last (45 vs. 13 at this point in the cycle), but so too have some of the other new players (especially PPP, 21 vs. 5). (He also notices what we've noticed, that SurveyUSA is polling less this cycle; they poll only when hired to do so, and he speculates that TV stations and newspapers have cut back their polling budgets.) Interestingly, he also points to why Rasmussen is able to do so: a "major growth capital investment" from private equity firm Noson Lawen. (Noson Lawen, and what their potential agenda might be, sounds like an interesting topic for enterprising investigative bloggers...)
• AR-Sen: Despite the seemingly imminent entry of Rep. John Boozman into the GOP field in the Arkansas Senate race, soon-to-be-former-frontrunner state Sen. Gilbert Baker says he's staying in the race. The alternative would be to run for Baker, who represents Little Rock suburbs, to run for the open seat in AR-02 instead - but there he'd face a tough primary against Beltway GOP favorite Tim Griffin, who's already established a solid fundraising foothold. (Some of the seven dwarves in the GOP field, who seem concentrated in the state's right-leaning northwest, may be interested in switching to Boozman's open seat in AR-03, though.) And unbelievably, yet another Republican is interested in getting in the Senate race: former NFL player Jim Lindsey is readying for a bid. Lindsey is a real estate developer and former University of Arkansas trustee.
• AZ-Sen: Sarah Palin is still dancin' with the one who brung her. She announced yesterday that she'll appear on behalf of John McCain, who plucked her from near-obscurity and is now needs a favor of his own as he's facing a primary challenge from the right from ex-Rep. J.D. Hayworth. Needless to say, this provoked a lot of disappointment from her supporters among the teabagging set, who would prefer to see her stab McCain in the back and then field dress him.
• CO-Sen: With right-wingers filled with antipathy toward establishment choice ex-Lt. Gov. Jane Norton, there's been a lot of casting about for an alternative. Weld County DA Ken Buck seems more and more like he'll be that guy, as he's been making common cause with the Paulists, who are now planning to pay for a statewide advertising campaign on Buck's behalf. Meanwhile, on the Dem side, primary challenger Andrew Romanoff is trying to energize his sleepy campaign with a big hire - pollster Celinda Lake, whose previously sterling reputation got driven off a cliff with her handling of the Martha Coakley campaign.
• CT-Sen: There's not much left to see for the 2010 race, but everyone's thinking ahead to 2012, with the new rumor afoot that - with the Senate Kennedy-free for the first time in more than half a century - Ted Kennedy Jr. may run against Joe Lieberman in 2012. Lieberman himself is up to his usual asshattery, speculating out loud that he could conceive of becoming a Republican, and also saying that he might support Linda McMahon in the 2010 race... seeing as how Richard Blumenthal (tepidly) supported Lamont in the 2006 general while McMahon supported Lieberman. Apparently Lieberman learned his politics from watching the Godfather: it's not business. Just personal. (Lieberman also seems to be a believer in leaving the cannoli, and taking the guns.)
• FL-Sen: In the wake of new polling showing him falling behind Marco Rubio in the GOP Senate primary, the questions are getting louder about whether Charlie Crist might consider running as an independent instead. He said no to that idea... but people are noticing he didn't rule out switching parties altogether. With Crist appearing side-by-side with Barack Obama today in Florida (something he wouldn't consider doing if he saw any hope in trying to compete with Rubio - who just got the endorsement of ur-conservative Steve Forbes -- on conservative bona fides alone), could that actually be a consideration? If so, he'd need to switch parties by April 30.
• MA-Sen: There are a couple more retrospectives worth reading on Massachusetts, as people try to make sense of the mixed messages sent by exit polls (with one particularly intriguing tidbit: 52% of Scott Brown voters approved of Ted Kennedy's performance). Mark Blumenthal also looks at the shift in polling over the last few weeks, wondering again about the differing results gotten by live interviewers vs. robocallers, while also pointing to questions of how much pollsters' views of a race can actually change the overall momentum of the race (fundraising and perception-wise) and thus become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And get ready for the teabaggers' week-long love affair to end very soon: Scott Brown (who apparently has some self-preservation instincts) just served notice on the GOP that he won't always vote with them.
• ND-Sen: This isn't going to make the teabaggers any happier: Gov. John Hoeven, now running for the Senate, joined the Democratic Party in 1996 (at a time when he was head of North Dakota's state-owned bank), ditching them in 2000 for his gubernatorial run. With Hoeven already on their naughty list for his insufficiently anti-government stances, now he's just going to get more wrath.
• NH-Sen: Former AG Kelly Ayotte is wielding an internal poll by the Tarrance Group that gives her a big edge in the GOP primary against her challengers. She leads Ovide Lamontagne, coming at her from the right, 43-11. Random rich guys Bill Binnie and Jim Bender clock in at 5 and 3 apiece. No general election numbers were released.
• NV-Sen: One more disastrous poll for Harry Reid, which came out from Research 2000 a few days ago. This poll closely echoed one from PPP a few weeks ago that tested alternative Democrats, and finds that only Las Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman beats the Republicans (while Rep. Shelly Berkley and SoS Ross Miller don't fare much better than Reid). Unfortunately, this was all rendered moot a few days ago by Goodman's announcement that he wasn't going to run for either Governor or Senator. Reid loses 52-41 to Danny Tarkanian and 51-42 to Sue Lowden. Berkley loses 46-40 to Tarkanian and 45-40 to Lowden, while Miller loses 44-36 to Tarkanian and 43-37 to Lowden. Goodman beats Tarkanian 44-41 and Lowden 44-40. Rep. Dina Titus, facing a tough re-election of her own, doesn't seem to think much of Reid's chances anymore: she publicly said "Reid is done; he's going to lose."
• NY-Sen-B: One other Research 2000 poll to talk about: they looked at the Democratic primary in New York, and find about what everyone else has found. Kirsten Gillibrand leads ex-Rep. Harold Ford Jr. by a 41-27 margin (with 3 for Jonathan Tasini), looking solid but still with a ton of undecideds. This also exists merely at the level of rumor, but with the potential presence of Ford scrambling things for the ever-so-briefly-thought-to-be-safe Gillibrand, sources say that Democratic Rep. Steve Israel (who got dissuaded from a primary challenge) and Republican ex-Gov. George Pataki (who hasn't sounded interested until now) are both giving the race a little more consideration.
• PA-Sen, PA-Gov (pdf): Franklin & Marshall's previous polls in Pennsylvania have tended to have unusually high undecideds, suggesting that they don't do any pushing of leaners at all - but this may have reached an all-time high with their new poll. Most notably, they find Allegeheny Co. Exec Dan Onorato completely dominating the Democratic gubernatorial primary... at 10% (more than doubling up on Jack Wagner, Joe Hoeffel, and Chris Doherty, all at 4)! They also find similarly low numbers in the Senate race, where Republican ex-Rep. Pat Toomey leads incumbent Dem Arlen Specter 45-31 and Rep. Joe Sestak 41-19 (?!?), and where Specter beats Sestak in the primary 30-13. (They didn't do a general election poll in the Governor's race, but find Republican AG Tom Corbett leading his remaining rival, state Rep. Sam Rohrer, 23-5 in the primary.)
• UT-Sen: The Mason-Dixon poll that gave us some (not so good) gubernatorial results also threw in some vague questions about the Senate race too. Incumbent Bob Bennett leads a Generic R in the primary, 46-27, and a Generic D 53-26 in the general. Nevertheless, Bennett drew yet another primary opponent, albeit someone seemingly of the Some Dude variety: local businessman Christopher Stout.
• WI-Sen: Wherever there's a vacillating Republican needing convincing to get into a Senate race, there's Rasmussen. (Whaddya wanna bet they have a Patty Murray/Dave Reichert poll in the field right now?) Contrary to PPP's view of the race, Rasmussen finds ex-Gov. Tommy Thompson leading incumbent Dem Russ Feingold, 47-43. They find Feingold with a perplexingly low 47/48 approval.
• CT-Gov: Is ex-Rep. Chris Shays looking to get into the Governor's race? Suddenly, it sounds like he's at least thinking about it, saying he'd like to do it but not sure if it's feasible. He's currently in Washington as head of the Wartime Contracting Commission, meaning he'd need to re-establish his Connecticut residency, but given his long-time popularity in his district (which eventually got too blue for him to hold) he might have a leg up on the so-so GOPers already in the field.
• FL-Gov: Quinnipiac released the gubernatorial half of its Florida poll yesterday, finding that Republican AG Bill McCollum has a somewhat bigger lead on Democratic CFO Alex Sink, 41-31 (McCollum led 36-32 in October). Sink leads state Sen. Paula Dockery 35-29, but considering that McCollum leads Dockery 44-6 in the GOP primary, that configuration doesn't seem likely.
• MI-Gov: Two guys who had been unlikely candidates for the Democratic nomination for Governor both announced they wouldn't run. Rep. Bart Stupak is the big name to say "no," which is good as far as the DCCC is concerned, as he's needed to hold down the fort in his R+3 district. The other is Detroit Pistons head of basketball operations Joe Dumars, who probably realized he'd get pretty banged up out there without Bill Laimbeer to run interference for him. One other interesting rumor of who might run, though, is ex-Rep. Joe Schwarz, the GOP moderate who got bounced out in a 2006 Club for Growth-fueled primary by Tim Walberg. And get this... he's talking about running as an independent. Could he actually peel off enough center-right votes for the Dems to salvage this race?
• NY-Gov: Research 2000's New York poll also looked at the Democratic gubernatorial primary, finding AG Andrew Cuomo defeating incumbent David Paterson, 63-19. Paterson is laboring under 34/54 approvals. The GOP primary to see who gets flattened by Cuomo is looking pretty uneventful: Erie Co. Exec Chris Collins, who continued to express vague interest despite having gaffed his way out of contention several months ago, finally pulled the plug on his exploratory committee. That leaves ex-Rep. Rick Lazio as the only major GOPer in the race, to few people's enthusiasm.
• TX-Gov: Looks like Gov. Rick Perry isn't much of a fan of the librul media, or at least he realizes that his key demographics aren't really the newspaper-reading types. He's decided not to sit for editorial board interviews prior to their pre-primary endorsements.
• Site News: SSP is instituting a one-week waiting period for new users to post diaries. New accounts can still post comments right away.
• AL-Sen: This race has to rank somewhere around 32 or 33 in order of likelihood to change hands among Senate races this November, but at least we're showing up to compete: Birmingham-area attorney William Barnes announced that he'll run against Richard Shelby for Team Blue. It's his first run for office, and he says it'll be a "total grassroots" effort (which I think is code for "can't self-finance").
• AZ-Sen: J.D. Hayworth and Dana Rohrabacher always seemed like kindred spirits in their particularly loudmouthed version of ultra-conservatism. That seems to continue today, as the Orange County Congressman gave his former colleague his first big-name endorsement in his newly-minted primary challenge to John McCain.
• MA-Sen (pdf): There's a wealth of data in the Washington Post's post-game poll of the Massachusetts special election; it's well-worth looking through the whole memo. As with other polls, it points to a confluence of Republican enthusiasm and a Democratic failure to define the opposition (or themselves). Interestingly, only 60% of Brown voters say they favor Republican policies in Congress, and only 19% of them want him to work mostly to oppose Democratic policies instead of working to get Republican ideas into Democratic policy.
• NY-Sen-B: His helicopter's warming up on the launch pad: Harold Ford Jr. seems to be moving closer to a Senate primary run. An ally says he's "80 percent" likely to run, and various steps he's taking suggest he's getting his ducks in a row - reserving web domains, and even crisscrossing the state, visiting that previously unknown sixth borough of New York City known as "Buffalo."
• WA-Sen: Republican insiders seem to be wondering if they can use the Massachusetts results to coax a top-tier (or any-tier, really) Republican to get into the race against Patty Murray. The problem for them is that there are really only two GOPers who are appealing and moderate enough to play at the statewide level, and AG Rob McKenna already seems to have his ticket booked for a 2012 gubernatorial run. That leaves Rep. Dave Reichert, whose spokesperson made a run sound unlikely, while still saying he "is not one to shut doors on any opportunity."
• IL-Gov: It may be news to you that someone named Bob Schillerstrom was running for Governor. Apparently it was news to the people of Illinois, too, as he dropped out at a strangely late stage (after consistently polling in the low single digits) and endorsed ex-AG Jim Ryan for the Republican nod. Schillerstrom's lack of traction is kind of strange, since, as DuPage County Board Chairman, he has nearly a million constituents. His name will remain on the ballots, which have already been printed.
• MD-Gov: The one elected Republican who seemed to be following through on running for Maryland governor decided against it and opted for a different course instead. State Del. Patrick McDonough is now running for Baltimore County Executive. McDonough had previously said he wouldn't run if ex-Gov. Bob Ehrlich tried for a rematch, and while Ehrlich hasn't done anything public on that end, McDonough said he thinks Ehrlich is planning to do it.
• OH-Gov: More polling bad news for incumbent Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland: he's trailing ex-Rep. John Kasich 51-45 in the new poll from the Univ. of Cincinnati. (Strickland led 49-46 in their previous poll in October.) One bit of the poll gives Strickland a potential way forward, though, if he can get his messaging to work: "When asked who's to blame for Ohio's economic misery, Bush ranked first, at 24 percent, followed by Wall Street and financial institutions at 23 percent and the U.S. Congress, 19 percent. President Barack Obama got the blame from 13 percent while just 3 percent blamed Strickland."
• PA-Gov: Another poorly-kept rumor panned out to be true: that wealthy Philadelphia businessman Tom Knox was going to drop out of the race and endorse Allegheny Co. Exec Dan Onorato, which happened over the weekend. Knox said he could have funded a big ad blitz to get competitive (he'd been polling in single digits) but didn't want to hand ammunition to the Republicans. It's unclear whether the big beneficiary here is Onorato, though, or ex-Rep. Joe Hoeffel, who benefits from being the only Philadelphia-area candidate left.
• SC-Gov: Looks like Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer isn't going to lay claim to the mantle of "compassionate conservatism" any time soon. The would-be successor to Mark Sanford compared poor people to stray animals over the weekend, saying: "You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that." He tried walking that back today, regretting his choice of words and also adding that he's "not against animals," either.
• UT-Gov: Enthusiasm about our chances in the Utah governor's race, thanks to the entry of Salt Lake County Mayor Peter Corroon and a recent Deseret News poll showing a competitive race, has to be tempered by the new Mason-Dixon poll of the race on behalf of the Salt Lake Tribune. They find incumbent GOP Gov. Gary Herbert with a more substantial lead over Corroon, 55-30.
• WY-Gov: Former US Attorney Matt Mead made his widely-anticipated entry into the race official, as the backlog of top-tier Republicans running for the state house continues to grow. There's still no word from incumbent Dem Dave Freudenthal on what his plans are, regarding the possibility of challenging the state's term limits law and running for another term.
• PA-08: Ex-Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick had only a short exploratory period before an official launch of his campaign to get back his seat from Rep. Patrick Murphy; he announced his candidacy at a public appearance on Saturday.
• PA-10: Some Dude named Ted Yale announced his candidacy on the Republican side in the 10th. Considering that the news story doesn't even note his occupation, I'm not convinced Yale poses much of a threat, but there is something more interesting buried in the article... former US Attorney Thomas Marino is now "expected" to announce his candidacy next week.
• Retread watch: Can you believe that more than 20 former House Republicans are running again this year, either for Senate, governor, their old seat or, in the case of Richard Pombo, some completely other seat? The Hill runs down the full list.
• Redistricting: Republicans have realized that the way back to power lies in the state legislatures, via their control over the post-2010 redistricting process in most states, and they're budgeting accordingly. A new enterprise, the American Majority Project, and an old one, the Republican State Leadership Committee, are looking to get more involved in closely-controlled legislatures, and they have some big-name backers involved.
• KY-Sen: Rand Paul makes an interesting point: he'd like SoS (and GOP primary rival) Trey Grayson to recuse himself from his secretarial duties during the May election. In other words, he doesn't want Grayson to count the votes of the election that he's running in. (Unsurprisingly, Grayson's spokesperson says "no.")
• MA-Sen: An AFL-CIO post-game poll finds that a majority of labor households in Massachusetts went for Scott Brown in the special election, by a narrow 49-46 margin. The one consolation Democrats might take from that failure is that a large majority of respondents said they were "choosing the best candidate" rather than "sending a message to Washington," which suggests that the success (or lack thereof) of the two campaigns at defining the individual candidates is the main story here.
• NY-Sen-B: This seems to exist mostly at the level of idle speculation, but people in the know are wondering whether Harold Ford Jr.'s apparent entry into the Democratic primary may open the door for other primary candidates who considered the race and then thought better of it to get back in, out of hopes they might shoot the gap in the middle.
• PA-Sen, PA-07: Pennsylvania's Democratic party chair, T.J. Rooney, is now publicly urging Rep. Joe Sestak to "pull a Gerlach" and bail out of his Senate primary bid while heading back to nail down his suburban swing seat instead. This isn't that remarkable, as Rooney has been outspoken all year in his desire to avoid paralyzing primaries - but you've gotta wonder if Sestak, who's stalled a bit in the polls lately, is considering it in the back of his mind.
• WI-Sen: Rarely has so much ink been spilled writing about a four-word quotation ("I'm not saying no"), but with that utterance yesterday from ex-Gov. Tommy Thompson, thus begins a whole 'nother round of speculation as to whether the 68-year-old Thompson's unlikely bid to challenge Russ Feingold will ever materialize.
• KS-Gov: State Sen. Tom Holland sounds willing to step up and take on the job that no one seems to want: running against Sen. Sam Brownback in the open gubernatorial race in Kansas. Holland represents one of the state's few purplish areas, with a district that includes part of college town Lawrence, but he clearly plays to win, as seen in the fact that he's beaten two different incumbent Republicans in his state legislative career.
• AK-AL: Between being kind of old and on everybody's "most-likely-to-be-indicted" list, Alaska's Don Young is a tempting target, from both the left and right. He got another primary challenger yesterday: never-before-elected telecommunications executive Sheldon Fisher. Gadflyish businessman and blogger Andrew Halcro (who won 10% as an independent in the 2006 gubernatoril race) has already said he'll run against Young in the primary, too.
• AR-01: As we reported yesterday, Rep. Marion Berry is sounding kind of unenthused about much of anything right now. Fleshing out that interview we mentioned, Berry said it's his "intention" to run again, but, as part of a longer excursis waxing philosophical about his own mortality, wouldn't make an absolute commitment to sticking around.
• HI-01: A fourth entrant (and a third Democrat) seems likely to get into the special election to replace retiring Rep. Neil Abercrombie: state Sen. Will Espero is starting an exploratory committee. Because of the weird all-parties, winner-takes-all nature of the election, the fear is that a Democratic pileup could open the door to a victory by lone Republican Charles Djou - but a recent Mason-Dixon poll of the race finds Djou a distant third behind well-known Democratic opponents Ed Case and Colleen Hanabusa, and it's unclear whether Espero has the name rec to make much of a dent one way or the other on that.
• MA-10: Republicans in the Bay State are taking a renewed interest in competing in House races there, usually something that gets completely neglected. In the wake of Scott Brown's victory, former state Treasurer Joseph Malone is now saying that he's planning to run against Rep. William Delahunt in the 10th, which is probably the least secure district for Democrats in the state; covering Cape Cod and much of the South Shore, it's at D+5, but the source of some of the darkest red on this week's map. Delahunt was unopposed in 2008. The GOP is also interested in fielding candidates in the 3rd and 5th against Jim McGovern and Niki Tsongas, two other blue-collar Catholic districts that gave big margins to Brown.
• MS-01: Here's a surprise: after painstakingly clearing the GOP field for state Sen. Alan Nunnelee and getting him off to a good fundraising start, the NRCC is now meeting with Fox News talking head Angela McGlowan about a run against Rep. Travis Childers in the 1st. McGlowan hasn't been elected before, but she does have experience as a staff member to Sen. John Ensign.
• NJ-03: In addition to being an NFL player, NJ-03 Republican candidate Jon Runyan is apparently also a gentleman farmer in his spare time. He owns a 20-acre spread in rural New Jersey, but pays only hundreds of dollars in property taxes each year on 15 of those acres thanks to using them as farmland - in order to raise four donkeys. (I'm sure the irony of raising donkeys is lost on no one, although the land probably isn't zoned to allow for elephants instead.)
• NY-23: The Doug Hoffman camp is touting an internal poll showing him with a big lead over potential rivals for the GOP nomination this year, including the more establishment figure of Assemblyman Will Barclay. Hoffman, still benefiting from a lot of name rec after gaining national attention from the special election, leads Barclay 56-22 in a hypothetical 4-way contest also involving would-be-picks from last time Matt Doheny and Paul Maroun.
• MA-St. Sen.: The good news is that Democrats may have a shot at picking up Scott Brown's Senate seat in a special election (date TBA). The seat covers parts of Middlesex, Bristol, and Norfolk counties in Boston's southwestern suburbs. 21-year state Rep. Lida Harkins says she'll run for the Democrats; physician Peter Smulowitz also intends to run. State Reps. Richard Ross and Elizabeth Poirier may run for the GOP. The bad news? They don't really need a pickup, as the Dems already have a 34-4 edge now (with one other vacancy in a safe Dem seat to be filled, thanks to the resignation of prison-bound Anthony Galluccio).
• Supreme Court: As you probably know, the Supreme Court opened the door yesterday to a flood of special interest money into the election process with their decision in Citizens United. The case allows corporations, labor unions, and other similar entities to make unlimited independent expenditures on behalf of candidates, although they still can't make direct contributions to the candidates' warchests. Rich Hasen's Election Law Blog and How Appealing have roundups of links to many different discussions as to what all it means. (Everyone seems to agree it's a big deal, but just how big a deal seems up for debate.)
• Census: Census Director Robert Groves is out with a timetable for all the movements that will occur over the next few months to get the Census up and running, seemingly to be executed with military precision. And if just can't get enough Census discussion, Groves even has his own blog now.
When it comes to writing about elections after the fact, I'm not a big post-mortem guy -- I feel it can sometimes be a little disingenuous to diagnose a race with absolute certainty a day or two after, in many cases, you were hedging your bets as to the final outcome. That said, though, there are an endless supply of post-mortems out there on Martha Coakley's mind-numbingly bad result last night, and some of them actually have some worthwhile observations to offer. Let's round up a few of these pundit attempts to leave their mark on the CW:
DemFromCT also has a pundit roundup. If data, rather than chatter, is your drug, the WVWV exit poll is now available, as is Rasmussen's not-surprisingly dead-on election night poll.
While we're talking about lessons to learn from the debacle in Massachusetts, two tough questions that need to be asked, discussed, and reflected on a great deal are:
1. How to get better at picking good candidates in primaries, and
2. What are the danger signs to look out for in a primary that might warn us a candidate that looks good in a primary will bomb in the general election?
Like a head coach whose heavily-favored team craters early in the playoffs, DSCC Chair Bob Menendez has to be feeling pretty vulnerable right now. If Menendez were to get pushed aside from his current role, who could take his place? Whom would you want to take his place? The floor's all yours.
You had better learn and take to heart the lessons provided yesterday by your neighboring colleague. In particular: (1) a gigantic lead now is VERY MUCH NOT the same as a blowout victory (or even any victory), and (2) neglect is NEVER the right way to run a campaign.
Q: Where are the other potential Dem collapse areas this Nov? A: Almost precisely the places Hillary carried in the 08 prez primary
He's definitely on to something. Below is a map of the 2008 presidential primary results in Massachusetts between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Red is Clinton, blue is Obama:
The results between tonight's race and the presidential primary correlate at a rate of 0.56, which is quite high.
Polls have now closed in Massachusetts, as Martha Coakley and Scott Brown square off to replace Ted Kennedy in the Senate. In the primary, we got our first nibble of results fifteen minutes after polls closed, so hopefully we won't be waiting too long for the first trickle of numbers to come in tonight.
9:33PM: (Crisitunity): Coakley missed most of her baselines:
Agawam 35/64 (should've been 41/57 under 2008 model)
Andover 41/58 (should've been 44/55)
Braintree 37/62 (should've been 38/60)
Fall River 57/41 (should've been 61/38)
Needham 52/47 (should've been 54/45)
New Bedford 59/39 (should've been 62/37)
Springfield 61/37 (should've been 65/34)
Wellesley 50/50 (should've been 53/46)
Westfield 36/62 (should've been 41/57)
Fitchburg was 40/59, almost exactly how Suffolk pegged it. (Should've been 48/50, the biggest underperformance I've seen.)
But we beat the spread in Belmont: 59/40 (should've been 57/41)
and Quincy was right on: 46/53 (should've been 46/52)
9:23PM: The Associated Press has called this one for Big Brown. Say hello to your newest Senator from Massachusetts: Republican Scott Brown!
9:23PM: Coakley has conceded, according to Cillizza.
9:20PM: With two-thirds of the vote in, Jeff's model has nudged up to somewhere between 47.7 and 47.94% for Coakley.
9:13PM: 1405 precincts are now in, and Brown is holding firm at 53-46. I don't see how Coakley wins this, but look on the bright side, Democrats: at least they'll be a special election for Scott Brown's Senate seat! Democrats only have a 34-5 margin of control in that body!
9:04PM: 1298 precincts in, and Brown leads by almost 90,000 votes. (53-46) Coakley's on pace to end up somewhere between 47.6-47.8%.
9:03PM: Using the Jeff model, Coakley is on pace to 47.5% ('08) or 47.85% ('96). Not looking so hot.
8:58PM: 980 precincts are in, and Brown leads by 52-47.
8:55PM: 875 precincts are now in, and Brown is up 53-46. Wasserman tweeted earlier that he thinks that Scott Brown has won.
8:54PM: Sorry folks -- we're getting utterly slammed with traffic tonight and the site is experiencing some server issues.
8:51PM: 738 precincts are in, and Brown leads 52-47.
8:40PM: We're up to 445 precincts now, and Brown is holding onto his 53-46 lead (or a 33,000 vote gap).
8:35PM: 283 precincts in, and Brown still leads by 53-46 (or about 18,000 votes).
8:32PM: 243 precincts in, and Brown's up to 53-46.
8:29PM: Jeff: Under his 2008 model, Coakley is projected to win 49.2% of the vote based on the returns so far. But using the 1996 model, she's projected to win 52.5%. Still a nailbiter.
8:27PM: 143 precincts in, and Brown leads 51-48.
8:22PM: 116 (of 2168) precincts are now in, and Brown leads by 52-47.
8:20PM: From Jeff: "Coakley's underperforming the baseline by just a little bit. Model sez 48.7% Coakley by 2008; 49.8% Coakley by 1996." Of course, we know that the model is not perfect, but this is looking pretty tight so far.
8:18PM: 36 precincts are now in, and Brown has a 10-point lead.
8:14PM: The AP has a few numbers in from 12 precincts, where Scott Brown leads by 54-45.
8:10PM: Rasmussen just released some details on their e-night poll. Among those who decided in the last few days, Coakley has a 47-41 advantage. Among those who made up their mind over a month ago, Coakley has a "big advantage". I guess this race hinges on just how well Brown is going among those who made up their mind within the past month, but not within the past few days.
Polls close in Massachusetts tonight at 8PM Eastern. As usual, we'll be liveblogging the race until the bitter end. By the time we're done, you'll be left with stems and seeds.
Let's use this thread to take care of the pre-game chatter.
Benchmarks: If you haven't yet seen Crisitunity's town-by-town benchmarks for the absolute bare minimum that Martha Coakley needs in order to win, get your fine self over to that thread. It'll definitely be something worth keeping in your pocket as you follow the returns tonight. Blue Mass Group has a list of key benchmarks to watch for, and David Wasserman has an expansive spreadsheet available.
Jeff's take: SSP data guru jeffmd offers his projection model for the race.
Turnout: The Boston Globe has a list of poll-watcher reports by town. Greg Sargent (my former boss at Talking Points Memo), has some hard turnout numbers from Boston indicating that the city appears to be juiced-up about the race.
1994, redux?: A former Ted Kennedy aide sees parallels between the race between Scott Brown and Martha Coakley, and the '94 Senate race between Kennedy and Mitt Romney. The aide's math suggests that Coakley will win.
Fingerpointing: However, you know things are tense when Democrats are already getting a head start on the blame game. Oy.
Polling: Rasmussen will be out with a new poll as soon as the results start to trickle in. And if you're looking for exit polls, there are none to report. However, the cumbersomely-named Women's Voices. Women Vote has commissioned an exit poll by Lake Partners Research and American Viewpoint. Those results won't be available for dissection until tomorrow morning, though.
I'm as freaked out over Massachusetts as anyone - and I might be plenty angry/despondent/confused/hungover tomorrow morning.
But in the meantime, I've been working on a crude projection model using, in part, the "baseline" idea that Crisitunity and DavidNYC have made a part of SSP Election Night Tradition.
The model, as inputs, takes partial results from towns that have reported, and outputs a whole slew of numbers comparing the current situation to the "baseline" numbers.
The county baselines post has become a game day staple at Swing State Project for advanced elections-returns-watchers, and today's no different. The basic idea here: find the bare minimum percentage in each major county that's necessary to get the Democratic candidate over the hump at 50%. (That, of course, is predicated on all the counties moving the same direction as the presidential election the benchmarks are based on, which doesn't actually happen in real life, but it's a rough estimate.) As election returns come in, compare the benchmarks to the actual returns to see if we're on track to win.
There's one small problem here, which most of you are probably already familiar with: Massachusetts, and the other New England states, don't report election results by county, but rather by town. With hundreds and hundreds of little towns, that's a lot of ground to cover, so we'll just look at the biggest, plus some towns in what seem to be the key areas to watch in this race.
In fact, let's take a look at the state's town-by-town map, created by our own DavidNYC (you can click on the map to see a full-size version):
This map is based on the relatively close 1996 Senate election between John Kerry and William Weld (a better choice here, because a map of the 2008 Presidential race would be almost entirely blue, and the 2002 gubernatorial race would be almost entirely red, with Romney winning the vast majority of towns). But it gives the general lay of the land in the state: the Democratic votes are heavily concentrated in Boston and its immediately surrounding cities. (There's also a lot of low-density blue out in the college towns and arty enclaves of the Berkshires and Pioneer Valley in the west.) The red on the map is mostly rural and low-density too, so the real areas that we're focused on today are the purplish and pinkish suburban turf to the north, west, and south of Boston.
Rather than just one model, I'm using two different models: one based on the high-turnout, high-Democratic-intensity 2008 presidential election (won by Barack Obama, 62-36), and the low-turnout, low-intensity 2002 gubernatorial election (won by Republican Mitt Romney, 50-45) -- more generally, a best-case scenario for Dems and a worst-case scenario for Dems. With turnout projections high but not as high as yesterday (SoS William Galvin is predicting 40%), and weather mediocre, we're probably looking at something somewhere in between, so consider these the bookends. Nevertheless, after making the necessary adjustments, both models, in most towns, point to very similar benchmarks.
Let's start with the largest cities in Massachusetts (the ones that provide more than 1% of the state's votes each). These aren't really the places to watch, as they're heavily Democratic (with the sort-of exception of Quincy) and the real question with them is whether turnout is keeping pace proportionately with the rest of the state.
Town
% of state vote in 2008
2008 %
What's needed in 2010
2002 %
What's needed in 2010
STATEWIDE
100.0
62/36
50/48
45/50
48/47
Boston
7.7
79/20
67/32
61/33
64/30
Worcester
2.0
68/30
56/42
52/42
55/39
Springfield
1.7
77/22
65/34
59/37
62/34
Cambridge
1.5
88/10
76/22
69/22
72/19
Newton
1.4
75/23
63/35
54/40
57/37
Quincy
1.3
58/40
46/52
48/47
51/44
New Bedford
1.1
74/25
62/37
70/26
73/23
Brockton
1.1
70/29
58/41
49/47
52/44
Somerville
1.1
82/16
70/28
61/29
64/26
Lowell
1.0
65/33
53/45
47/47
50/44
Fall River
1.0
73/26
61/38
67/29
70/26
Democratic performance in most of the state, as you can see above, stayed fairly consistent with the rise in the tide from 2002 to 2008. Statewide, Democratic performance went from 45% to 62% (a 17% gain), and, for example, Boston followed that closely, going from 61% to 79% (an 18% gain). Many other towns tracked that, too; for instance, the most conservative parts of the state (like Falmouth and Sandwich on Cape Cod, or the suburbs around Lowell) also moved about 16 to 18% in the Dems' direction.
The interesting areas are the ones where the movement was much greater -- these tend to be the wealthier areas in the state, fancy Middlesex Co. suburbs like Wellesley or North Shore towns in Essex Co., consistent with Obama's overperformance nationwide among high-income voters -- and where the movement was much less -- mostly in blue-collar towns of the South Shore, as well as other blue-collar outposts in the state's west. To me, these seem to be the swingy areas, and the ones most worth watching, especially since the trends may (or may not) continue to accelerate today -- upper-middle-class voters may be attracted to Coakley's technocratic image (especially those in Middlesex Co., where she was DA) or they may revert to liking the fiscal conservatism that they saw in Romney, while blue-collar voters seem likely to respond to Brown's regular-guy shtick but may also be motivated by their ancestral Democratic loyalties and union or local machine GOTVing.
Let's start with some well-to-do suburbs west of Boston:
Town
% of state vote in 2008
2008 %
What's needed in 2010
2002 %
What's needed in 2010
Acton
0.4
68/30
56/42
41/52
44/49
Belmont
0.4
69/29
57/41
42/53
45/50
Concord
0.3
71/28
59/40
45/48
48/45
Needham
0.6
66/33
54/45
41/54
44/51
Wellesley
0.5
65/34
53/46
37/58
40/55
Winchester
0.4
60/39
48/51
37/58
40/55
And here are North Shore suburbs. (Lawrence is a little out of place here, as it's working-class with a large Hispanic population, but it had the same large 02 to 08 shift that its wealthier neighbors did.)
Town
% of state vote in 2008
2008 %
What's needed in 2010
2002 %
What's needed in 2010
Andover
0.6
56/43
44/55
32/63
35/60
Danvers
0.5
55/44
43/56
35/61
38/58
Lawrence
0.6
80/19
68/31
57/37
60/34
Marblehead
0.4
61/38
49/50
36/60
39/57
Newburyport
0.4
66/32
54/44
43/52
46/49
Peabody
0.9
57/42
45/56
43/53
46/50
Now turning to the more blue-collar locales where the trend seemed less favorable to Democrats, starting with the South Shore towns. (Looking up to the biggest towns list above, you can see that same trend happened not only in Quincy, but especially in Fall River and New Bedford, which are strongly Democratic but barely moved at all from O'Brien to Obama. In their cases, I'm not sure if that's indifference to Obama, or particularly strong local machines good at keep turnout consistent.)
Town
% of state vote in 2008
2008 %
What's needed in 2010
2002 %
What's needed in 2010
Braintree
0.6
50/48
38/60
42/55
45/52
Bridgewater
0.4
49/49
37/51
37/59
40/56
Middleborough
0.4
46/52
34/64
35/59
38/56
Taunton
0.7
59/39
47/51
51/45
54/42
Weymouth
0.9
54/45
42/57
43/53
46/50
And finally, a mix of western mill towns and blue-collar suburbs around Springfield:
Town
% of state vote in 2008
2008 %
What's needed in 2010
2002 %
What's needed in 2010
Agawam
0.5
53/45
41/57
40/56
43/53
Chicopee
0.7
61/36
49/48
51/45
54/42
Fitchburg
0.5
60/38
48/50
46/49
49/46
Pittsfield
0.7
76/22
64/34
64/32
67/29
Westfield
0.6
53/45
41/57
42/54
45/51
Now for the bad news... Suffolk polled several bellwether towns over the weekend, and found that Coakley is polling well below the level she needs to meet the benchmarks, in fact slightly below even Shannon O'Brien levels from 2002. They found a 41/55 race in Fitchburg (see the western mill towns chart), and a 40/57 race in Peabody (see the North Shore chart). I have no idea about the sample size or any of the other innards, but this suggests that for Coakley to pull this out -- as has been more broadly evident for several days -- the only way is for the pollsters to have been missing large swaths of heretofore unactivated voters who just got transformed into Democratic likely voters in the last few days.
Blue Mass Group has an interesting post that lists some other bellwether towns that you might want to keep an eye on. UPDATE: (And Cook's Dave Wasserman has made available a Google spreadsheet doing more or less the same thing for every single freakin' town in the state, albeit only for the 2008 model. Check it out.)
We've got no babka to give out this time, folks, so you're just playing for bragging rights. Let's hear it: Dig deep and give us your best and most honest prediction of what what the end result will be in the Senate special election between Democrat Martha Coakley and Republican Scott Brown.
Martha Coakley (D): 43
Scott Brown (R): 52
Joe Kennedy (I) 2
(MoE: ±4%)
You know, we've picked these polls apart enough already, so how about we all take a page from trowaman and ask: If Scott Brown takes this race tomorrow, who should Democrats run against him in 2012? Not that we're predicting that he'll win, but it's never too early to think through the hypotheticals. Tell us who you think should run in the comments.
Martha Coakley (D): 48 (49)
Scott Brown (R): 48 (41)
Joe Kennedy (L) 3 (5)
Undecided: 1 (6)
(MoE: ±2.8%)
First the bad news: R2K gives us a trendline pointed steeply down... an R2K poll conducted earlier in the week (paid for by Blue Mass Group rather than Daily Kos, but seeing as how that shouldn't change the numbers, we'll accept that as a trend) gave an eight-point lead to Democratic AG Martha Coakley, and this one sees a tie. On the other hand, that's the best result that rolled in over the last few days: not only are there the Suffolk (-4) and PPP (-5) numbers, but also ARG (which sees a 48-45 Scott Brown lead)... and the Merriman River Group, whoever they are, who found a 51-41 lead for Brown in a poll that was apparently taken over the space of four hours and found no undecideds, so take that for what it's worth.
So, should we be pleased or not? Does this mean that Coakley's bungee-jump downward over the last week got arrested right before she hit the bottom of the canyon? There are a few other positive indications; the constantly-leaked Coakley internals, for what they're worth, seem to have stabilized over the weekend (which saw Barack Obama and Bill Clinton appearances, and maybe some backlash over the "curling iron" incident), to the extent that they reportedly show Coakley up 2, according to the Boston Herald. (Nate Silver has a helpful graph of all poll trendlines that includes leaked Coakley internals, which brings a lot more datapoints to bear.)
One other indication is that state officials are suddenly looking at extremely high turnout, at near-presidential levels, with everyone suddenly focused on the election -- with estimates of up to 70% turnout, based on absentee ballot requests. Turnout, as you know, most likely helps the Democrats here -- and the pollsters that have been giving pro-Brown results may be basing their likely voter models on now-obsolete projections based on low-turnout, high-intensity-voters-only projections. One other good Nate Silver observation is that Obama's approval is polling under 50% in most polls, which is lagging his national averages... in Massachusetts, one of the bluest of all states... suggesting their LV models are predicated on conservatives disproportionately showing up. (Of course, he also points out the possibility of what Rasmussen alone seems to be seeing: people approving of Obama, but still voting for Brown.) But if the state's turnout predictions are to be believed, maybe some of those unlikely-voter Dems who were planning to sit this one out or weren't aware of it have finally realized there's a real race here and have gotten converted into LVs over the last few days, and pollsters are still playing catchup.
-Brown is up 64-32 with independents and is winning 20% of the vote from people who supported Barack Obama in 2008 while Coakley is getting just 4% of the McCain vote.
-Brown's voters continue to be much more enthusiastic than Coakley's. 80% of his say they're 'very excited' about voting Tuesday while only 60% of hers express that sentiment. But the likely electorate now reports having voted for Barack Obama by 19 points, up from 16 a week ago, and a much smaller drop from his 26 point victory in the state than was seen in Virginia.
-Those planning to turn out continue to be skeptical of the Democratic health care plan, saying they oppose it by a 48/40 margin.
-Coakley's favorability dropped from 50% to 44% after a week filled with perceived missteps. Brown's negatives went up a lot but his positives only actually went from 57% to 56%, an indication that attacks against him may have been most effective with voters already planning to support Coakley but ambivalent toward Brown.
I recognize that there is an intense level of anger and frustration among we of the Democratic base right now, faced as we are with a scenario most of us could not have conceived in our worst nightmares, however I think the rabid anti-Coakleyism spreading around the internets these days is getting just a wee bit unfair. In this respect I largely agree with Nate Silver - yes, she is a boring candidate, and yes, she did run a dull, almost absentee campaign... but when you're in Massachusetts, and you're a high-profile statewide elected official, and you're running as a Democrat against a fairly obscure state senator to succeed Ted Kennedy, none of those things should be unforgivable offenses. Let's face it: there is a LOT of Monday morning quarterbacking going on here. To be sure, there were plenty of people (myself included) who had reservations about her in the primary, but clearly none of those concerns translated into anything near the blind, existential panic we are now facing as we creep up upon January 19th. If anyone can point to a post he/she left, here or anywhere else, indicating his/her grave uneasiness about the threat posed by Scott Brown in a general election, I'd love to see it - I'm genuinely curious.
This is obviously not to say Coakley's camp is blameless. Going dark for a month was malpractice of the highest order, and her campaign manager should never be allowed to work in American politics ever again. But the over-the-top vitriol being directed at the candidate herself is starting to become unseemly, and frankly sort of classless. I doubt any of us can imagine what its like to be in her shoes at this very moment, being pegged by pundits and partisan activists nationwide as the pariah who single-handedly flushed the Democratic supermajority - and by extension, Ted Kennedy's dream of universal healthcare - down the drain. By all accounts, Martha Coakley is a capable public servant, a fairly committed progressive, and by almost any measure a more qualified candidate for the United States Senate than Scott Brown. Yes, her probable defeat on Tuesday will almost certainly mark the end of her political career, and that can be argued as being perfectly appropriate, but I hardly think it cause for open celebration.
Just as determinate as any particular fault of the Coakley campaign is, I think, the basic issue highlighted by PPP in the poll that touched off this horrific week: a profound disparity in enthusiasm between D's and R's, the very same one reflected in the outcomes of the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia. The electorate turning out for special/off-year downballot elections is simply a different universe of individuals than those who came to the polls in 2008. Beyond the predictable backlash from the right, who knows how many people voted for Obama having never voted in their lives, and may never vote again? I think we can anticipate the relative drop-off from here out to be comparable to what we have seen thus far, and that alone augurs poorly for our near-term electoral prospects - whether or not we have Coakleys or Capuanos on the ballot.
• MA-Sen: With last night's Suffolk poll, there really can't be any doubt any more that the Massachusetts Senate race qualifies as a "Toss Up," so we're changing our rating to reflect that. There's still room for skepticism on whether Scott Brown can in fact pull it out, given not only the difficulty of pinning down a likely voter universe in a rapidly-fluctuating special election, but also the Democrats' structural advantages on the ground in the Bay State. (The Democrats have the advantage of labor and local machines long-skilled at rousting out voters and getting them to the polls, while it's questionable whether the Republicans have, given their long neglect of the state, any ground troops to deploy here, or even up-to-date, refined voter databases.) Nevertheless, given what can actually be quantified, right now the polls balance out to more or less a tie, and that's how we have to treat the race.
The breaking news du jour is that Barack Obama has finally agreed to head up to Massachusetts and stump for Martha Coakley on Sunday. Also, the Coakley campaign is rolling out a second ad for the weekend, to go with their ad showcasing the Vicki Kennedy endorsement; they're also running a populist-themed ad on Wall Street regulation (specifically, the rather narrow issue of the proposed bonus tax on banks). The ad deluge is being bolstered a League of Conservation Voters ad buy for $350K; on the third-party front, that's being countered by a pro-Brown ad buy for $500K from Americans for Job Security.
• CA-Sen: Yesterday I was musing about whether ex-Rep. Tom Campbell's entry into the GOP Senate primary hurt Carly Fiorina or Chuck DeVore more, and we already seem to have an answer. The Campbell camp is touting an internal poll showing them with a sizable lead over both Fiorina and DeVore in the primary: Campbell is at 31, with Fiorina at 15 and DeVore at 12. The few polls of the primary so far have shown Fiorina and DeVore deadlocked in the 20s, so maybe it's safe to say that Campbell hurts them each equally.
• FL-Sen: Which of these is not like the other? There's a new multi-candidate GOP fundraising PAC called the U.S. Senate Victory Committee, which benefits seven different Republicans: Kelly Ayotte, Roy Blunt, Jane Norton, Rob Portman, Rob Simmons, Pat Toomey... and Marco Rubio? Six establishment candidates, and one insurgent. Or is Rubio the new establishment?
• PPP (pdf): PPP looks all the way to 2012 as part of their wide-ranging Nevada survey, and finds that John Ensign may weather his whole giving-a-patronage-job-to-the-cuckolded-husband-of-his-mistress thing, if he runs again. Ensign trails Las Vegas mayor (but probable 2010 gubernatorial candidate) only Oscar Goodman 43-41, but leads Rep. Shelly Berkley 49-40 and SoS Ross Miller 47-36. Of course, Berkley and Miller aren't that well-known yet and would presumably gain ground in an active 2012 race, but again, more food for thought on the idea that Republicans really don't get the vapors over sex scandals after all, so long as they're perpetrated by Republicans.
• MN-Gov: The St. Paul Pioneer Press is out with a poll of Minnesota voters (by a pollster I've never heard of, Decision Resources Ltd.). The poll seemed most focused on the question of whether there should be public funding of the new Vikings stadium, but it did throw in (almost as an afterthought) something we haven't seen before: general election head-to-heads in the Governor's race. The numbers are pretty encouraging for the Democrats: ex-Sen. Mark Dayton leads ex-Sen. Norm Coleman 41-31, and state Rep. Marty Seifert (who, assuming Coleman doesn't get in, is the likeliest GOP nominee) 41-25. State House speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher beats Coleman 33-31, and Pat Anderson (who dropped out of the race this week) 33-23. There weren't any numbers for Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak, another strong contender for the Dem nod. And yes, if you're wondering, this does take into account the potential spoiler role of Minnesota's Independence Party; IP candidates account for 11 to 13 percent of the vote in each of these trial heats. (H/t alphaaqua.)
• NH-Gov: One other gubernatorial poll has good news for Democrats, and it even comes from Rasmussen. They find incumbent Gov. John Lynch in safe position with 58/38 approvals and, against his no-name opponents, leading social conservative activist Karen Testerman 53-30 and businessman Jack Kimball 51-32.
• OH-Gov: Who knew that John Kasich had the power to transcend the boundaries of space and time? In an effort to court the GOP's restive base, Kasich said "I think I was in the Tea Party before there was a Tea Party."
• WY-Gov: One more big-name Republican (by Wyoming's small standards) is getting into the gubernatorial race, banking on the assumption that incumbent Dem Dave Freudenthal won't jump through the legal hoops necessary to run for a third term. Auditor Rita Meyer is getting into the race, where potential GOP primary rivals include former US Attorney Matt Mead and state House speaker Colin Simpson.
• AL-05: Rep. Parker Griffith is showing his true colors. The party-switcher has been turning away requests for refunds of contributions that don't meet the requirements buried in the fine print: he says he can't refund donations for the 2008 cycle, only the 2010 cycle, because the 2008 contributions were spent long ago.
• AR-02: Rep. Vic Snyder is in pretty dire shape, if a new poll from SurveyUSA is to be believed: he trails Republican candidate and former US Attorney Tim Griffin by a 56-39 margin. You may want to take this poll with a grain of salt, as it was paid for by Firedoglake, who seem to have an axe to grind in the health care reform debate, and the Snyder numbers seem to be less the main point than engaging in strangely-right-wing-sounding message-testing. The good news is that, even after a variety of anti-HCR arguments have been offered (and Nate Silver does a fine job of picking apart the survey), Snyder doesn't fare much worse (at 58-35); the bad news, though, is that the 56-39 topline question was asked before any of the litany of anti-HCR talking points, suggesting that, HCR or no, we have a major problem in Arkansas.
• AZ-03: Despite Jon Hulburd's surprising cash haul, he may have bigger company in the Democratic primary to replace recently-retired Republican Rep. John Shadegg. Phoenix mayor Phil Gordon is the subject of speculation; he had briefly considered a 2008 run against Shadegg before ruling it out, saying his post-mayoral future would be in the private sector, but all eyes are on what he does now. (Gordon lives slightly outside the district's boundaries.) On the GOP side, there's no clear frontrunner at all. State Rep. Sam Crump has already said he's running. Possible other candidates include state Treasurer Dean Martin (who would have to drop down from the gubernatorial bid he just launched this week), state Sens. Pamela Gorman and Jim Waring, Phoenix city councilor Peggy Neely, former ASU football star Andrew Walter, and, in a shocker, the co-founder of Taser International Inc., Tom Smith. Former state House speaker Jim Weiers has taken himself out of the running.
• NC-11: Businessman Jeff Miller has reversed course and will run against Democratic Blue Dog Rep. Heath Shuler in the 11th. Miller had been recruited to run, but decided against it; he'll have to face a primary against Hendersonville mayor Greg Newman, who got in after Miller initially declined.
• OH-15: The Ohio GOP is still searching for an Auditor candidate after Mary Taylor decided to run for Lt. Governor instead of re-election. Former state Sen. Steve Stivers has been asked to run for Auditor, but made clear he'll be staying in the race in the 15th (where he might actually have better odds, considering how close he came to Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy last time).
