SSP Daily Digest: 4/6 (Afternoon Edition)

AZ-Sen: Maybe she was scared off by that R2K poll that had her down more than 20-odd points? Nan Stockholm Walden, a wealthy attorney and businesswoman who had been the subject of DSCC interest as a candidate in Arizona, decided not to run. That gives Tucson city councilor Rodney Glassman a pretty clear path to the nomination (assuming he runs; he’s still in exploratory mode).

CT-Sen: Did you know that Linda McMahon actually held (until now) a political position, in addition to, of course, all the important work she does at WWE? She was on Connecticut’s Board of Education (an appointed position, courtesy of Jodi Rell), but just resigned from that role. She says that there are too many restrictions on political activities by board members for her to be able to remain in that position, as she tries to get the GOP Senate nomination.

SD-Sen: John Thune may have dodged having to run against a Democrat in November, but he won’t be running purely unopposed. He’s still facing off against an independent, perennial candidate Kurt Evans.

WI-Sen, WI-Gov: I had no idea that St. Norbert was the patron saint of fucked-up polls. A poll from Wisconsin Public Radio/St. Norbert College is tilted even further in the Republican direction than recent offerings from Rasmussen and the decidedly conservative Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. They find Russ Feingold losing to Tommy Thompson 45-33 (with 14% for an independent/third party, whoever that might be), and beating Generic R by only 40-37. Their gubernatorial numbers find Tom Barrett losing to Scott Walker 44-28 and to Mark Neumann 43-29. Even the GOP primary numbers seem screwy, with underdog Neumann almost even with Walker, who leads 24-23.

CA-Gov: Meg Whitman rummaged around in her purse and found another $20 million to throw on the table, bringing her personal contributions to the race up to a whopping $59 million. Despite her big lead over Steve Poizner in the primary, she may need to prepare to shore things up, as Poizner has been telegraphing that he’s going to start going hard at her on the hot-button issue of immigration, in a last-ditch effort to get the state’s right-wingers to pay some attention to him.

GA-12: There were some poorly sourced rumors yesterday that Rep. John Barrow — a conservadem in a swing district facing a primary challenge and the ire of a large swath of his African-American constituency after his HCR “no” vote — was going to switch parties. Barrow now says he was never even contemplating that, though.

KS-03: After the Kansas City Star reported last week that Stephene Moore was going to run to replace her husband, Dennis, in the 3rd, she started acting coy about it (despite insider assurances that it was a done deal). As expected, though, today she made it official, filing a glaring hole in this R+3 open seat.

LA-03: It looks like the NRCC is finally getting a top-tier participant in the open seat race in the 3rd (despite that winning it won’t be much of a prize, as the 3rd is poised to vaporize in 2012 redistricting). Former state House speaker Hunt Downer says he’ll announce his candidacy very soon. Probably the surest indication that Downer is serious is that state Rep. Nickie Monica, who may have been the strongest GOPer in the field to date, now says he’s getting out of the race to make way for Downer. With attorney Ravi Sangisetty the only Dem willing to stick his neck out for this one, this one’s pretty thoroughly in the GOP column.

MN-06: State Sen. Tarryl Clark has been putting up some monster fundraising numbers against Michele Bachmann this cycle; I guess that’s what happens when you run against one of the nation’s top lightning rods for teh crazy. She pulled in $505K last quarter, bringing her to $1.1 million in total receipts this cycle. Unfortunately, Clark (or her primary opponent Maureen Reed, who’s also raised well but hasn’t released Q1 numbers yet) will likely have to contend with the presence of spoiler Independence Party candidate Bob Anderson. Anderson pulled in 10% of the vote in 2008 (while Elwyn Tinklenberg lost by only 3%), and he’s seeking the IP’s endorsement again.

NH-01: RNC committee member Sean Mahoney made a big show out of resigning his post, ostensibly out of disgust with the Michael Steele administration and its free-spending, strip-clubbing ways. Speculation, though, is that Mahoney is planning to run in the GOP primary in the 1st (where Manchester mayor Frank Guinta is considered frontrunner, although so-so fundraising has diminished his luster a bit), which would require him to resign anyway. Mahoney isn’t promising anything on that front yet, though.

NY-29: The Democrats have literally chosen Some Dude as their standard bearer in the 29th. The party chairs in the eight counties in the district issued a statement where they said they’ve chosen a consensus nominee to replace Eric Massa in the special election that may or may not happen. However, they neglected to actually say who that candidate might be. We’ll know the masked man’s identity next week.

TN-03: A Huck divided against itself cannot stand? In a prime example of one hand not knowing what the other is doing, HuckPAC (Mike Huckabee’s national financial arm) and Team Huck Tennessee (the local grassroots operation) are endorsing different candidates in the GOP primary in the 3rd. Team Huck is endorsing former state GOP chair Robin Smith, while HuckPAC (and presumably, Huckabee himself) is going with attorney Chuck Fleischmann.

TN-08: State Sen. Roy Herron had another fine fundraising quarter as he tries to keep this open seat in Democratic hands; he pulled in $490K last quarter, leaving him with more than $1 million cash on hand. It’s not an expensive district, media-wise, but he has some strong fundraising competition from humble gospel-singing farmer agribusiness mogul Stephen Fincher, who pulled in over $300K himself and is sitting on $820K CoH.

PA-St. Sen.: As if the Pennsylvania legislature couldn’t be held in any lower esteem, here’s another fresh scandal. Luckily, this one seems to be falling on the Republican side of the aisle: state Sen. Jane Orie, the body’s third-ranking GOPer, was just accused by a grand jury of repeatedly using her staff for political campaigns on the state’s dime (include the campaign of her sister, state Supreme Court justice Joan Orie Melvin). Charges are expected, but Orie is shrugging it off, saying it’s a politically motivated smear by Democratic Allegheny Co. DA Stephen Zappala.

Filings: The filing deadline in Missouri has passed, on March 30. Rep. Roy Blunt wound up with (count ’em) 10 Republican primary opponents in the Senate race, although state Sen. Chuck Purgason seems the only one worth paying attention to. The number of GOPers vying to take on Ike Skelton in MO-04 also reached the double digits. Probably the biggest surprise and disappointment was in MO-09: not that the DCCC would likely have strongly contested this district that they barely lost in 2008 when it was open, but not a single Democrat showed up to run in this race.

Teabaggers: Here’s a nice catch from Ruy Teixeira: teabagging is about as popular as socialism. In slightly-differently-worded questions from two different 2010 polls, Gallup found that 37% had a favorable opinion of “the Tea Party movement” (including 14% of Democrats), while 36% had a positive image of “socialism” (including 17% of Republicans?!?).

39 thoughts on “SSP Daily Digest: 4/6 (Afternoon Edition)”

  1. Bob Anderson, the Independence Party candidate, did not cost El Tinklenberg a Victory over Michelle Bachmann in 2008. If Anderson was not in the race Tinklenberg would have needed to carry Anderson voters 65-35 in order to  beat Bachmann,  that would have been highly unlikely IMO. In fact my guess is he took more votes from Bachmann, people who were put off by Bachmann but would never vote for a Democrat.

  2. http://www.13wham.com/news/loc

    Zeller, 28, is a Rochester area native with family throughout the 29th Congressional District and roots in the Southern Tier.

    snip

    Also according to that release Zeller worked as an embedded combat mentor to the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police while on deployment in 2008.  Zeller, a friend tells me, got the urge to enlist in the Army following the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.  While attending college he was a member of the ROTC program.

  3. Now Glassman needs to get his ass in gear and actually start fundraising, and I don’t mean $20 a pop either.  This could be a Kendrick Meek-style race for Glassman, but only if he starts putting up Kendrick Meek-style fundraising numbers.

  4. http://articles.latimes.com/20

    The book is about Poizner’s experience teaching for a year at Mount Pleasant High School in San Jose.  Poizner’s depiction of the school is less than kind:

    He (Poizner) was relieved, he writes, to find his Lexus safe in the parking lot after his first visit. He built a lesson around the corporate history of Kentucky Fried Chicken rather than that of Apple, thinking Col. Sanders would hold more relevance for the students than Steve Jobs.

    He ruminates that the underprivileged and, often, uninterested teens on the fringe of Silicon Valley would never match the achievements of young people from his own affluent town of Los Gatos, in the heart of high-tech country.

    Probably not the story he wants as he tries to gain some footing in the primary.  

  5. Awhile back, I was praying for just a warm body in KS-03 and I got one with name recognition but nepotism baggage, which I guess is God’s mischevious way of answering.

    That said, I’m glad that she opened with “I’m not entitled to this seat.” Btw, progressives, she’s pro-choice, pro-cap-and-trade, and said she would’ve voted for the health care bill. Not even the “moderate” Republican in the race will go anywhere near those positions (well, Yoder’s been a shaky, occasional pro-choice vote). Also, her website is not awful:

    http://www.stephenemooreforcon

    It’s not completely filled out yet, but it’s decent and….holy crap! The Moores apparently have 7 kids?!?

    That is unexpected. Of course, ole Dennis does play a mean guitar, and we know how the ladies feel about that…but damn. No wonder he’s tired.  

  6. The son of the guy Charles Rangel beat in the primary back in 1970 to win his Senate seat. Does anyone who knows New York City politics think Powell stands a chance?  

  7. There are spring elections today, mostly just county board and school boards up but also some circuit court races and local referendums nothing too interesting as far as i know. Though for me there is a local school referendum i voted against and in a town near me there is some 19 year old who is on the city council challenging an incumbent mayor.

      As for that poll it seems Wisconsin based pollsters suck badly.

  8. Speaking of teabaggers, I knew this article would be bad when it began with the names black people have been called (Oreos, Uncle Toms, etc.) supposedly for being teabaggers(!).

    http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/s

    It does highlight some black conservatives running in various races and my “favorite” part is the black dude campaigning in the bar with the Confederate flag.

    Sometimes I feel responsible for media FAILs because I work in the media. But I decided this crap is totally not my fault. I blame Rupert Murdoch.

  9. that total from Clark is extremely impress considering that it’s hardly a wealthy district (it kind of is, but the rich people are reactionaries so not for her purposes) and she is still facing a primary. I wasn’t expecting anywhere near that.

    Go Tarryl!

  10. in LA-03. He even managed to win  part of it in heavyweights-packed Gubernatorial “free for all” primary in 2003, despite his overall 6th place. And he has very typical background for many voters in this district: formerly a solidly conservative Democrat (of which there were a lot in Louisiana), now – even more solid conservative Republican.

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