The NRSC is hoping they can land Rep. Joe Heck
Leading Off:
• NV-Sen: Rep. Joe Heck has repeatedly said that he doesn't want to run for Harry Reid's open Senate seat next year, but national Republicans have never given up hope that they can change his mind. And sure enough, Heck confirms that he's been meeting with the NRSC, though they're going to need to keep working on their persuasion campaign. Heck says that while he's taking his "due diligence" while he considers, he's happy in the House and still leaning against a run.
After Gov. Brian Sandoval, who still appears incredibly unlikely to jump in, Heck is the GOP's top choice for this open seat. Heck is a formidable campaigner and a great fundraiser, and he can probably avert a competitive primary. The GOP has some other options: Jon Ralston writes that if Heck and Sandoval are both noes, the NRSC will probably turn to state Senate Majority Leader Michael Roberson or Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison. But there's little doubt that the GOP will be delighted if they can land Heck for what will be a tough race in a light blue state.
P.S.: DotVOTE tests Heck's odds in a hypothetical general election for polls.vote (we've never heard of either group). But rather than pair Heck up with former Democratic Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, who has the Democratic field to herself so far, they test Heck against Rep. Dina Titus, who is still considering what to do. They give Heck a huge 52-35 edge, which seems hard to believe. Heck and Titus faced off in a 2010 House race, where Heck pulled off a narrow 48-47 win (Titus returned to the House in 2012 in a different seat). Reid and the DSCC are both supporting Masto, so we probably won't see a Heck-Titus rematch next year in any case.
Senate:
• AK-Sen, AL: Former Democratic Sen. Mark Begich never ruled out running against Republican incumbents Sen. Lisa Murkowski or Rep. Don Young next year, but he never seemed incredibly excited about the prospect. And Begich now seems to have shut the door on a comeback bid, since he's joined the Washington lobbying firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.
It's not completely unheard of for politicians to take K-Street jobs but run for office that same cycle (Pete Hoekstra did it a few months before changing course and unsuccessfully seeking a Senate seat in 2012), but it's incredibly rare. And it's hard to believe that someone as savvy as Begich would affix himself with the dreaded term "lobbyist" (though technically, because of Senate ethics rules, he can't lobby for two years) if he had any interest in running for office again in the near-future.
• IL-Sen: We heard reports a few weeks ago that Chicago Urban League President and CEO Andrea Zopp was being encouraged to run against Republican Sen. Mark Kirk, and Zopp just publicly confirmed her interest for the first time. Zopp touted her experience in government and business, and said she's been talking to potential campaign staffers. National Democrats seem excited about Rep. Tammy Duckworth, who currently has the primary to herself, but Zopp would have former Obama chief of staff Bill Daley in her corner. Two other African Americans from the Windy City, Rep. Robin Kelly and state Sen. Napoleon Harris, are also considering bids.
• MD-Sen: We hadn't heard much about former Lt. Gov and 2002 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's Senate aspirations in months, but she's making it clear that she's still very interested in running. Townsend tells the Washington Post that she's "still working on putting things together and making a decision," though she calls the idea of serving in the Senate her dream. If Townsend jumps in, she'll face at least Reps. Donna Edwards and Chris Van Hollen in the primary.
Townsend hasn't run for office since her 52-48 loss to Bob Ehrlich in 2002. Townsend was definitely dragged down by her unpopular boss Parris Glendening, but she committed several missteps of her own. She calculated that she would run up the score with African Americans on her own and chose a white running mate, which proved to be a bad decision. Townsend was also very uncomfortable on the stump, accidentally coining the term "Hispanish" when trying to appeal to Latino voters.
No credible Republicans have taken any steps towards running for the Senate (Townsend's old rival Ehrlich seems intent on running for president) and it will be tough for the GOP to win in a state this blue in a presidential year. Still, there will be plenty of Democrats who won't be awaiting a Townsend comeback after what happened last time.
Gubernatorial:
• IN-Gov: For all the talk about a possible primary challenge to flailing GOP Gov. Mike Pence, Brian Howey makes a good point: Pence is still popular with Republican voters. In a recent poll that Bellwether Research—a Republican firm—conducted for Howey Politics, Pence garnered a 74-17 approval rating among members of his own party. That same poll showed Pence in miserable shape in a general election, stuck in the low 40s against a trio of possible Democratic contenders, so it was hardly a rosy survey for the incumbent.
But these crosstabs point to an intriguing split in the GOP base. While business interests were furious with Pence for tarnishing Indiana's image and making the state appear hostile to gays, Pence's support for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act doesn't seem to be causing him any issues with rank-and-file Republican voters. Indeed, it may even be boosting his standing with them. Typically, big business is brilliant at co-opting movement conservatives and convincing them that they share the same goals ("If we close the carried interest loophole on hedge fund managers, we'll be killing freedom!"). This might be one instance, though, where an unbridgeable gulf renders the old tricks useless.
In that case, if the folks populating corporate boardrooms decide that Pence is too unreliable and want him gone, they may have to wage their fight in the general election rather than the primary and back the eventual Democratic nominee. Given the poll numbers we've seen so far, that's looking like the smarter play—and it's not at all out of the realm of possibility.
• KY-Gov: Campaign finance reports covering the period from Jan. 3 to April 17 are in, giving us a look at the candidates standings ahead of the May 19 GOP primary. Former Louisville Councilor Hal Heiner has a clear lead in the few polls we've seen, and his personal spending looks to be a big reason why. Heiner only raised $278,000 from donors during the last few months but he's chipped in millions of his own money, and he has $1 million in the bank. State Agricultural Commissioner James Comer has raised $1 million and he also has that amount in the bank. But Heiner is capable of throwing down more money whenever he wants, and he's likely to continue outspending Comer.
Tea partying businessman Matt Bevin barely raised anything, but he's loaned himself $1.25 million. Bevin only has $286,000 on hand, and he'll definitely need to keep writing himself some checks if he's going to have any chance at pulling off an upset next month. Former state Supreme Court Justice Will Scott hasn't released his totals, though he's looking like a non-factor in this contest. On the Democratic side, Jack Conway, who faces only minimal primary opposition, raised $872,000 since January and holds $1.4 million cash-on-hand.
House:
• CA-29: Democratic Rep. Tony Cardenas has now spoken out about an FBI investigation into one of his top staffers, district director Gabriela Marquez, but he certainly isn't saying much. When a Roll Call reporter asked him about whether he'd been contacted by the FBI, Cardenas first refused to say, pausing awkwardly before offering some incoherent blather. Finally, Cardenas declared that the FBI had not contacted him, then vanished into an elevator. If that's true, though, why was that so hard to say in the first place?
Meanwhile, Politico also reported that the inquiry is not directed at Cardenas but rather centers around work Marquez allegedly performed for other campaigns while on the government payroll for her current boss. If so, then Cardenas has an easy out here, but everything so far is based on anonymous sources, and the only thing we know for sure is that the FBI has in fact subpoenaed Marquez, because she reported it to the House.
Other Races:
• Philadelphia Mayor: You don't see a race this tight every day. AFSCME just released a poll of the Democratic primary in Philadelphia's mayoral race, and there are three candidates within four points of each other. The poll, from GBA Strategies, finds ex-City Councilor Jim Kenney at 26, state Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams at 25, and ex-District Attorney Lynne Abraham at 22. AFSCME is backing Kenney, and the memo makes the case that Kenney has room to grow: he's already beating Abraham among white voters, while having much lower unfavorables than Abraham.
Williams and Kenney have also collected new endorsements ahead of the May 19 race, but they're all according to type. Philadelphia's Black Clergy (who represent more than 400 churches) and Black Ward Leaders both gave their endorsements to Williams. The Black Clergy's support is sometimes the difference-maker in Dem primaries (as it was in 1994, when Chaka Fattah knocked off incumbent Lucien Blackwell in the PA-02 primary -- but not in 2007, when they backed Dwight Evans in the mayoral primary and he finished fifth). In this case, though, it comes with a surprising asterisk: Kenney (who's white) was the Black Clergy's political committee's preferred candidate, but when it was time for the full group to vote, they picked Williams.
Also, unlike many previous elections, there isn't a variety of credible African-American candidates for the Black Clergy to choose from. Milton Street is too much of a gadfly, and the other option, outgoing Mayor Michael Nutter's former spokesman Doug Oliver, isn't getting any traction. Oliver unveiled a new TV ad this week, but if you look at the size of the buy (down in "video press release" territory at $2,300), it's clear he isn't getting the establishment backing he'd need.
Kenney, on the other hand, seems to be assembling the red/green coalition that other progressives have used to win big city mayoral elections in recent years. He's gotten most of the union backing so far, and now he's nailed down the backing of four major environmental groups, including the Sierra Club.
Grab Bag:
• Canadian Elections: On May 5, voters in the Canadian province of Alberta will go to the polls to decide on their next premier. After over four uninterrupted decades of Tory rule, our own James L. breaks down why this race has transformed from a Conservative cakewalk into a must-watch three-way fight, the likes of which Alberta has never seen.
• Polarization: Sometimes a good chart is worth a thousand words, and in this case, we have two great charts, so that's probably worth 2,000. Alan Abramowitz and one of his grad students, Steven Webster, have published a new piece at the Univ. of Virginia Center for Politics that demonstrates pretty clearly that ticket-splitting, more anything else, was what was keeping Democrats alive in the House in the 1970s and 1980s.
There are two prongs to the argument. The first is that the phenomenon of geographic clustering (Democrats piling into the nation's major cities and thus being distributed inefficiently in terms of where their votes are located) has always been with us, and even as gerrymandering as become more of a science, it hasn't exacerbated the problem that much. They show that the percentage of House districts more Republican than the country as a whole has been pretty stable since the 1950s, always in the 52-56 percent range.
And two, they look at the frequency of ticket-splitting, graphing the ratio of voters who vote for a Democratic presidential candidate and a Republican House candidate, versus voters who supported a Republican presidential candidate and a Democratic House candidate. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Republican president/Democratic representative voters vastly exceeded the Democratic president/Republican representative voters (although many of the former category were in rural Southern areas, electing proto-Blue Dogs, or "Boll Weevils" back then, to the House).
That tipped in the 1990s and 2000s, with Democratic president/Republican representative voters only narrowly exceeding Republican president/Democratic representative voters. With most districts now seeing voters consistently backing one party at both levels, the GOP's natural geographic edge gives them their majorities in the House. (Follow the link to see the charts, which put the trends into stark relief.)
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir and Jeff Singer, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, and Taniel.