• MN-Sen: Despite the seemingly increased likelihood that he'd jerk Al Franken around now that he doesn't have to worry about re-election and how impatient Minnesotans feel about the Senate vacancy, Gov. Tim Pawlenty says he'll certify Al Franken as winner of the Senate race if the state Supreme Court directs him to do so. Also, many are interpreting John Cornyn's comments about how the Senate GOP doesn't have the votes to filibuster Sonia Sotomayor, even if they wanted to, as being a tacit admission that Franken would be seated soon.
• NC-Sen: It never quite seemed likely, but Elizabeth Edwards silenced any speculation that she might run for Senate against Richard Burr next year.
• KY-Sen: Here's a new name sniffing out the Kentucky Senate primary. A staffer for Rep. Ed Whitfield from KY-01 just bought both domain names for "whitfieldforsenate.com" and "whitfieldforgovernor.com" (and inexplicably paid $800 for the two names). Maybe SoS Trey Grayson may have some company in the primary if Jim Bunning truly does bail out?
• VA-Gov: Ex-Del. Brian Moran leaked an internal poll from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner to Political Wire. Lo and behold, it shows Moran in the lead, with 29% to 27% for Creigh Deeds and 26% for Terry McAuliffe. (Meaning that in the last week, each of the three primary candidates have led a poll.) (UPDATE: PPP points out a flaw here: this isn't a topline, but the result from a subsample that's disposed to do well for Moran: people who've participated in Democratic primaries prior to last year's presidential race.)
Fundraising numbers for the three candidates also just came out: McAuliffe is way ahead on the money front, with $1.8 mil raised last quarter and $1.3 mil CoH ($7 mil total). Deeds raised $676K with $521K CoH ($3.8 mil total), and Moran raised $844K with $700 CoH ($4.8 mil total).
• MN-Gov: With T-Paw getting out, a flood of second-tier Republicans has spilled out in search of the nomination. State Sen. David Hann, state Sen. Geoff Michel, state Rep. Marty Seifert, state Rep. Paul Kohls, and former legislator Charlie Weaver are "interested." Former Auditor Pat Anderson is going so far as to say she'll announce in a month or two. Others mentioned include state Rep. Laura Brod, national committee member Brian Sullivan, and former state House speaker and current Labor and Industry Commissioner Steve Sviggum. The Star-Tribune also mentioned former Rep. Jim Ramstad (who'd do well in the general but may be too moderate to survive the nominating convention), state Sen. minority leader David Senjem, and one very big wild card... Norm Coleman, although his dragging-out of the Senate race can't have helped his favorables. One prominent name who apparently isn't interested: Rep. Michele Bachmann.
• MI-Gov: The Republican field in the Michigan governor's race got even more crowded, as Oakland Co. Sheriff Rick Bouchard got in. (Bouchard lost the 2006 Senate race to Debbie Stabenow.) Bouchard's entry was faciliated when his boss, Oakland Co. Exec L. Brooks Patterson, declined to run -- but Bouchard may do exactly what Patterson would have done, which is split the Detroit suburban vote with AG Mike Cox, making it easier for Rep. Pete Hoekstra from the state's west to sneak through.
• CO-04: Ex-Rep. Marilyn Musgrave fired off a rather unhinged-sounding fundraising letter on behalf of her new employers in the culture war, the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List. This may actually work to Rep. Betsy Markey's advantage; she made reference to Musgrave's letter in her own appeal for contributions.
• FL-17: Politics1 has an interesting, if a bit unsavory, rumor coming out of south Florida: 83-year-old former Rep. Carrie Meek may get on the ballot in FL-17, essentially to act as a one-term placeholder for her son, Rep. Kendrick Meek. (If he lost the Senate race, she would re-retire in 2012 and thus let him get his old job back. Or, if Meek won the Senate race, she'd still retire and let someone new take over FL-17.) Meek denied the rumor, though, to National Journal.
• FL-25: Here's a potentially big name to take on Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, who beat Joe Garcia by a small margin in 2008. Miami Mayor Manny Diaz is reportedly taking a look at the race; his name has also been mentioned in connection with the open Lt. Gov. slot.
• NC-11: PPP's Tom Jensen looks at possible Democratic successors in this R+6 district if Rep. Heath Shuler gives up the seat to run for Senate. He cites state Sens. John Snow and Joe Sam Queen as likeliest. (He also links to a great map from Civitas that calculates the PVI for all of North Carolina's state Senate districts.)
• SC-01: Rep. Henry Brown threw a "thank you" party in Myrtle Beach for his supporters, and at least 11 people walked away with the best possible tokens of his gratitude: diarrhea and nausea. State health officials are investigating to see if it was the result of food poisoning or just of the Republican rhetoric. Also, 2008 challenger Linda Ketner, who came close to knocking off Brown as an openly lesbian candidate in a dark-red district, may not be looking to run again. She did a refreshingly honest interview with FireDogLake, maybe a little too refreshing vis-a-vis her future viability, in terms of referring to "the conservative, religious crazy vote" and outing several prominent South Carolina politicians.
• UT-LG: A third generation of Romneys is getting warmed up (in a third state). Mitt Romney's 33-year-old son Josh has been in talks with soon-to-be-Gov. Gary Herbert about the open Lieutenant Governor's position.
• AL-St. Senate: Democrats can still be a downballot force in Alabama, managing to hold a state Senate seat in a deep-red part of rural Alabama north of Mobile. State Rep. Mark Keahey (who's only 28) narrowly defeated Republican former state Rep. Greg Albritton, in a special election triggered by the January death of Democratic Sen. Pat Lindsey. (UPDATE: Actually, it turns out that the margin wasn't so tight. Keahey crushed Albritton by a devastating 58-42 margin.)
• NH-St. House: In another special election, Democrats held a state House seat based in Lebanon, New Hampshire, as fire captain Andy White beat Republican Randy Wagoner. It's Democratic-leaning turf, but the GOP turned this into a proxy battle over gay marriage (White is a vote in favor of it), and out-of-district money enabled Wagoner to outspend White at least 4-to-1.
With Rep. Kendrick Meek vacating his seat for the unenviable task of running against Charlie Crist for the open Senate seat in Florida, that leaves a vacancy in this D+34 seat (the 13th most Democratic in the nation) based in the mostly-African-American suburbs to the immediate north of Miami. Like most vacancies in such dark-blue districts, it's attracting a crowded and diverse field in the Democratic primary.
The vacancy may produce a first: the first Haitian-American Congressperson. (Creole-speaking Haitians have a different set of concerns from non-Haitian African-Americans, with a focus on immigration.) It's the district with the nation's largest Haitian population (at least 16%, according to most recent Census estimates), and it's a community that Meek pays close attention to.
Three of the most prominent candidates already in the race are from the Haitian community: former state Rep. Phillip Brutus (the first Haitian-American elected to the state legislature), state Rep. Yolly Roberson, and activist Marleine Bastien. However, there may be several stumbling blocks preventing a Haitian candidate from winning: first, three candidates may split the Haitian vote, letting someone else win, and second, Brutus and Roberson are divorced from each other and are now bitter rivals, for whom the battle is seemingly personal.
With the Haitian vote split, odds would instead favor one of the non-Haitian African-American candidates. Shirley Gibson, the mayor of Miami Gardens (the largest city in the district with about 100,000 residents, although one that didn't exist until a few years ago, cobbled together out of unincorporated Carol City and its environs) just announced her candidacy on Tuesday, while state Sen. Frederica Wilson has been in the race since February.
There's one reason this race should be of particular interest to the netroots -- as I observed several weeks ago, New Dem Kendrick Meek is one of the biggest ideological mismatches with his district in the entire House, compiling the 126th most liberal record last Congress. In the quest for "Better Dems," he's doing us a big favor by getting out of the way without the time and expense of a primary fight (of course, his moderation, like that of Artur Davis, was probably in large measure due to his eagerness to move to statewide office -- understandable, but not something we have to thank him for, either).
And now, like the vacancy in AL-07 and the functional equivalent of a vacancy in LA-02, we have a free shot at electing a progressive to a dark blue seat previously held by a centrist... something the netroots needs to get on top of. There's only one problem... I really don't know much of anything else about any of these candidates, and the information out there is pretty inconclusive. So, I'm turning this over as a crowdsourcing question to any SSPers who know more about this district than I do: what else do we know about these candidates, especially where they might fall ideologically?
Rep. Kendrick Meek (D-Fla.) is expected to announce he is running for retiring Sen. Mel Martinez's (R-Fla.) seat on Tuesday morning, making him the first Democrat in the race.
Meek, a four-term congressman, has announced a 10 a.m. EST press conference in Miami, where Democratic sources with knowledge of his plans said he is set to announce he is entering the race.
I'm no big fan of Kendrick Meek, in no small part thanks to his non-support of our trio of Democratic challengers in South Florida this past fall, but thankfully I doubt that he'll have a clear primary field to himself. State Sen. Dan Gelber will also announce a decision shortly, and Florida CFO Alex Sink is also weighing a run.
Open seat fans have no reason to fret -- Meek's 17th CD has an absurdly Democratic PVI of D+35.
I address this screed to Congressman Kendrick Meek and Congresswoman Deborah Wasserman Schultz. I know that both of you have been under much scrutiny here in the blogosphere, based upon your recent recusals from campaigning against your neighboring Republican congresspersons. I suspect that you probably have your eyes on a senate race at some point in the future. In preparation for that, you probably think that you're positioning yourselves to be perceived as moderates who can work well across the aisle. However, I'm here to show you that if you consider such positioning to be part of a winning strategy, you are terribly mistaken.
One need not look further than the results of 2006 to learn that authenticity works. During that crucial election season, the Democratic party was faced with the outrageously tall order of winning at least six senate seats. As is the usual tendency of the deck, it was once again stacked against us. Our GOP opponents appeared to have financial advantages. At the outset of the year, we didn't even have six, let alone seven, viable seats, and severe party infighting threatened at least one critical race (Ohio). From that mess, the DSCC scrounged up seven viable challengers in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri, and Montana. Of these seven, six won. I will not focus on the Rhode Island race, since it was an unusual scenario in a state whose dynamics do not mirror those of swing states or of the nation at large. I'll also leave out Pennsylvania, since that was an instance of an incumbent who was so off his rocker, a piece of cardboard could've defeated him. And the Virginia race has been written about ad nauseum, so I'll skip that one as well. I will instead focus on Ohio, Missouri, Montana, and Tennessee; three wins and a loss, and why it turned out that way.
When Sherrod Brown prevailed over Paul Hackett in the primary for the Ohio senate, many Democrats became nervous; Hackett, an Iraq War veteran, seemed like a more viable option to run against incumbent Republican Mike DeWine than the unabashedly liberal Cleveland congressman whose record on the hot-button social issues was completely progressive. In the fabled state that won the election for Bush in 2004, it seemed like a bad idea to run a candidate whose record was to the left of John Kerry's. Well, as it turned out, Sherrod Brown proved to be an excellent candidate. Instead of fudging his answers and trying to make himself look like something he wasn't, he proudly stood up for his principles, emphasizing his economically progressive ideals, but without attempting to conceal his stances on the social issues. His unapologetic championing of the disadvantaged called to mind another progressive who never backed down from his core beliefs: the late, great Paul Wellstone.
Over in Missouri, then-State Auditor Claire McCaskill waged a tough fight against Jim Talent, the incumbent GOP senator. The stem cell initiative was on the ballot in that state, a potential risk in a state with such a high number of evangelicals. It was, therefore, a pleasant surprise when McCaskill put Talent on the defensive on that issue, and on the issue of abortion, in nearly every debate. In a key appearance on Meet The Press, Talent lobbed Republican talking points at McCaskill, and, rather than attempting to fit her responses into those frames, she effectively twisted them around to leave Talent as the weaker candidate, hemming and hawing and making excuses for his every statement. McCaskill's margin of victory was small, but in a very conservative state like Missouri, it was enough!
Out on the ranges, where libertarianism runs strong, the Montana senate race saw a battle between two very colorful characters: the doddering embarrassment Republican Conrad Burns, who was often looked upon as something of a senile uncle even by his fellow GOPers, and the plain-spoken, buzz-cut-sporting Jon Tester, who won the senate primary over a less progressive state official. Burns trotted out the old canard of fearmongering, trying to to use Tester's opposition to the PATRIOT Act as a political bludgeon. Had Tester been a weaker candidate, he would have attempted a nuanced explanantion, trying to convince people that he could be patriot without supporting the PATRIOT Act, accepting the right wing's frames instead of creating his own. Luckily, Tester unleashed the no-nonsense directness that is a trademark of the Mountain West; in one key debate, in which Burns accused Tester of wanting to "weaken" the PATRIOT Act (clearly a standard GOP frame, portraying the Democrats as weak on terror and weak in general,) Tester famously responded, "I don't want to weaken the PATRIOT Act, I want to repeal it." Had John Kerry been anywhere near this bold in 2004, Bush would not have had a second term.
After looking at the victories of Brown, McCaskill, and Tester, I now turn to the only high-profile loser on our side, Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee. Yes, I am well aware of the racist tactics that the Republicans used against Ford in the infamous "Call Me" ad (a frame-by-frame analysis is available here,) but I remain convinced that a stronger candidate, one with more backbone and more confidence in his own platform, would have been able to fight back and prevail. Ford embodied the ideals of a DINO at best. He appeared in a clumsy ad in a church, going too far into the territory of unsubtlety in an attempt to prove his religiosity. (I had serious flashbacks to John Kerry's 2004 proclamation of himself to be the "candidate of conservative values." The minute we accept the GOP frames, we're dead in the water). On the campaign trail in '06, Ford frequently trumpeted his opposition to gay marriage. He spoke in tones that ranged from cautious to mildly complimentary toward Bush's Iraq policies, all the while distancing himself from the Democratic leadership in the senate. In short, he ran as a Republican. And why would anyone vote for a Republican who doesn't have the conviction to actually run within the party that actually represents the conservative values he preaches, when they could vote for an actual Republican whose voting patterns are more sure-footed?
You see where I'm going with this. 2006 was a Democratic tidal wave, yet Harold Ford lost because of his own spinelessness and willingness to act like a Republican. The moral of the story here is to stick to your guns, champion your own progressive record, and be who you are. It's obvious that if you have achieved anything in Congress, you have been able to work with the other side. Playing "footsie" with Republicans does nothing to further your goals; in fact, it undermines them, since progressive voters might doubt your convictions. I certainly hope that your aides and advisors read this post, as it is crucial that you absorb its message. (For all the readers of this blog, I suggest writing to these Florida congresspersons and calling their offices to relay a similar message). Please, be a Sherrod Brown or a Jon Tester. Don't be a Harold Ford. Your political futures will be brighter for it, if recent history is any indicator!
