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10:07 AM PT: Polltopia: The News & Observer has a good interview with PPP's Tom Jensen, with various question's about the firm's methods and successes (and failures) this year. This might be the most interesting detail, though, about PPP's plans going forward:
Q: PPP does automated polls and doesn't call cell phones. Will this system work in 2016?
Our top order of business for 2013 is figuring out ways to integrate cell phones into our polls. It's just too large a percentage of the population now to just ignore cell phones. The days when you could reach everyone in the population by just one form of communication is probably over. In the '50s and '60s people went and interviewed people in their homes. And really for 30 or 40 years now you could just call someone on the telephone and that's how you did polling. I think we are going to get to a situation in the next four to eight years where older people you still need to contact by telephone, but that lots of other segments of the population you might reach online, you might send them a poll through a text.
Also amusing is Jensen's explanation of why he lost the race for student body president at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2005. Says Tom:
I had a very insider-oriented campaign, I won all the endorsements, I won the debates and then I got 18 percent of the vote in the actual election.
And what that taught me is the average voter—and when you're polling that's who you really need to worried about—didn't care about any of the stuff I was talking about. They voted for the guy who promised to bring a Wendy's to campus.
Once again, it all gets back to
giving gifts!
10:12 AM PT: NRCC: It turns out the D-Trip wasn't the only party committee taking out big loans this fall: The NRCC reportedly borrowed $12 million in late October for the stretch run. Now, the DCCC's loan was bigger ($17 million), but it's good to know, at least, that the GOP will also be in the hole as we start the new cycle. (Though as I always say, being able to go into debt is a good thing. You can spend more than you have and hey, lucky you! you get to pay it back later. Certainly Dems going +8 on the cycle is worth a big fat loan.)
10:35 AM PT: CA-52: It's done! GOP Rep. Brian Bilbray has finally conceded to Democrat Scott Peters, who currently leads by about one-and-a-half percent, though additional ballots remain to be counted. That closes out the books on California, leaving just a handful of congressional races uncalled nationwide: AZ-02, FL-18, and NC-07. Democrats lead in all three.
10:42 AM PT: Data: If you haven't seen this L.A. Times story on Obama's data analytics team, it's worth a read. The activities of this Moneyball-esque crew have always been kept tightly under wraps, though with the election over, OFA finally allowed a little sunlight to creep in. Reading this, though, you'll definitely wish you could learn more.
10:42 AM PT (David Jarman): WA-St. Sen.: When we last looked in on the Washington state Senate, two conservaDem dissidents were threatening to cast their lot with the GOP to the extent that a power-sharing agreement would be formed where Republicans could chair certain committees. Well, they've changed their tune in the last few days, perhaps realizing they don't need to stop there; now, the rumor is that, even though the Dems already elected Ed Murray as majority leader, the GOP+2 might order a re-do in January and install Rodney Tom, one of the two rebel Dems, as majority leader instead.
11:27 AM PT: CA-07: Hah, sheez. Even though the race was called on Thursday night, GOP Rep. Dan Lungren is refusing to concede to Democrat Ami Bera—and the AP reports his campaign manager says "that there would be no further statement from the campaign." Real nice.
11:27 AM PT (David Jarman): RGA: I'm surprised no one noticed this earlier, but a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter just noted that one of the anti-Jay Inslee ads that the RGA was running in the closing weeks of the Washington governor's race has a major flaw in it: it shows Inslee against a backdrop of the Pennsylvania state capitol. (She suspects the ad is the work of Pennsylvania media shop Brabender Cox, partly because it also recycles some old stock footage from a Tom Corbett ad.)
12:23 PM PT: FL-18: A St. Lucie County judge has just denied GOP Rep. Allen West's request for a full recount of all early votes, saying he did not have the authority to do so. However, the county's canvassing board will meet later on Friday afternoon, and they may decide to order a recount themselves. Sit tight; more to come.
12:58 PM PT (David Jarman): CA-30: Brad Sherman may be getting more familiar with the term "pyrrhic victory," where winning ugly isn't much better than not winning at all. Politico reports that Sherman is on the receiving end of a lot of wrath from much of the rest of the California delegation, most of whom backed Howard Berman in their member-on-member race, and now many of whom (especially delegation dean George Miller) are ticked at Sherman's play for GOP votes by linking Berman to Dem boogeymen like Barney Frank and Maxine Waters.
The blowback from him in-state colleagues, in fact, has gotten so deep that Sherman just had to withdraw his bid to become ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. With Berman's defeat, that leaves Sherman next in seniority, unless you count American Samoa delegate Eni Faleomavaega. A delegate has never been ranking member of a committee before, and the Dems may not be eager to start, either; if not, the slot would fall to New York's Eliot Engel (and Sherman just threw his support behind Engel).
1:04 PM PT (David Jarman): MA-Gov: The Boston Phoenix has a Great Mentioner piece on the election we know we'll have in Massachusetts, for a new Governor in 2014. (The hypothetical Senate special election, in case John Kerry becomes SoS, seems to get all the ink these days, but a lot of the same players for that are also potential gubernatorial candidates.) The article seems to place state Treasurer Steve Grossman, LG Tim Murray, and state Sen. Dan Wolf as being closest to making an announcement; there's also about a dozen other names mentioned, if you click through.
1:10 PM PT (David Jarman): Media: Conventional wisdom is that you target specific voting demographics by buying ads particularly on the shows they're likeliest to watch. An interesting retrospective in the Washington Post on the Obama campaign's ad-buying strategy turns some of that on its head, with them relying more heavily on simply on channel and time of day, without putting too much weight on what show was actually on. The strategy boiled down to more bang-for-the-buck by buying lots of time on smaller, cheaper cable networks to piece together a lot of different niche audiences into one big blanket. They're claiming a 10-20% more efficient use of their money thanks to this practice, so watch for this to become more of a thing in the future.
1:17 PM PT (David Jarman): UT-04: Roll Call has a thorough post-mortem on how Blue Dog Jim Matheson dodged yet another bullet last week; the most interesting detail, though, may be at the very end: that his final internal poll from Anzalone Liszt gave him a one-point lead over Mia Love. Why not release that poll, we've wondered, especially when it would contradict those (evidently quite wrong) public polls showing him losing? Well, at that late date, he didn't need to roust out any more donors, and he may have thought a sneak attack would be better going into Election Day.
1:20 PM PT (David Jarman): IA-Sen: This isn't much of a story until we hear something affirmative from Tom Latham, but Republican Gov. Terry Branstad is already meddling in the 2014 Senate race, trying to dissuade Steve King (who's already made some rumbling noises) by publicly saying that he thinks the less conservative and abrasive Latham would be a better statewide candidate.
3:49 PM PT: MD-Gov: This just shows you how screwed Maryland Republicans are: Daniel Bongino, the former Secret Service agent who took just 27 percent in a suicide run against Dem Sen. Ben Cardin this fall, says he's considering a run for the open governor's seat in 2014... and no one can think of a single other name who might do so. Says one local poli sci prof: "Off the top of my head, I don't have another name. The fact no name comes to mind suggests there's a very short bench if any bench at all for the Republican Party." Ayup.