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8:38 AM PT: Arkansas: Roll Call's Joshua Miller visits Arkansas on the paper's around-the-country tour of each party's "farm team" in every state. What's frustrating, as you'll find when you click through, is that there are still quite a few plausible Democrats in many parts of the state who could make legitimate runs for Congress—indeed, Miller cites a whole bunch by name—but it seems like no one actually wants to pull the trigger and take on any GOP incumbents. Indeed, the only hope Team Blue apparently has is in the 4th, but only if freshman Republican Tom Cotton runs for Senate. Even the 2nd, which is the state's bluest district thanks to the presence of Little Rock, isn't attracting much interest. My feeling is that it'll only become harder and harder for Democrats to win any federal seats in Arkansas as time marches on, so if I were gonna make a run, I'd want to do it soon.
8:58 AM PT: MN-Gov: We already knew Norm Coleman wasn't going to seek a rematch against Al Franken; now the Republican ex-senator confirms he won't run for governor, either. Consider this a good day.
10:10 AM PT: MI-Sen: In the wake of Dem Sen. Carl Levin's retirement announcement on Thursday, we're seeing the usual wintry mix of potential candidates declining, expressing some interest, and just getting name-checked by the Great Mentioner. First, a bit of good news for Democrats: GOP Rep. Candice Miller, who probably would have been one of the Republicans' strongest choices, says she won't run. (Why risk a safe House seat as a member of the majority for a difficult Senate race that could still land you in the minority even if you win? Exactly.) While we're discussing Republicans, Christian private schools founder Clark Durant, who waged an unsuccessful bid for his party's Senate nomination last year, also won't do it.
Meanwhile, AG Bill Schuette sounds unlikely, saying he "will continue on serving the citizens of Michigan as their Attorney General," in Abby Livingston's words, though that's obviously not an iron-clad statement. But plenty of other names are circulating, including Reps. Mike Rogers and Justin Amash, former SoS Terri Lynn Land, and Lt. Gov. Brian Calley, though one unnamed operative suggested that Calley might be more interested in Amash's House seat if Amash seeks a promotion. A Politico piece also mentions current Secretary of State Ruth Johnson.
As for Democrats, we suggested a bunch of possibilities in the previous Digest, but most chatter seems to be revolving around Rep. Gary Peters, who is the best-positioned member of Michigan's current congressional delegation to succeed Levin. But he's not exactly the "heir apparent" in the same way, say, Bruce Braley is to Tom Harkin in Iowa, so he could very well face a contested primary. And here's one new name: Democratic National Committeewoman Debbie Dingell, the wife of John Dingell. (Dingell's very old and has been around forever, but his wife is almost 30 years his junior.)
10:20 AM PT: And poor PPP. They had a Michigan poll in the field just days before Levin made his decision not to run again which of course was rendered immediately obsolete by the news. But it's not entirely without its uses, because PPP looked at the favorables of various GOP alternatives, and their toplines against Levin can be used to judge their relatives strengths:
The one who came the closest to Levin was Candice Miller, although she still trailed him 46/35. She has good statewide favorability numbers with 33% of voters rating her favorably to 25% with an unfavorable opinion.
No one else came within 15 points of Levin. Justin Amash has a 9/20 favorability rating and trailed Levin 49/34. Mike Rogers has a 16/19 favorability rating and trailed Levin 49/33. Bill Schuette has a 20/25 favorability rating and trailed Levin 51/32. And Roger Kahn had a 5/15 favorability rating and trailed Levin 50/30.
One other Republican who we didn't test on this poll but could potentially be a good candidate is former Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land. in December 2010 we found she had a 36/21 favorability rating and trailed Debbie Stabenow by only 4 points in a hypothetical contest.
10:52 AM PT: I guess Calley's out, too: Reporter David Eggert says he "doesn’t' plan to run."
11:41 AM PT (David Jarman): Demographics: You're probably frowning at this map, wondering what the heck historical election it represents. Well, it's nothing of the sort: it's a religion map. The red states are ones where the plurality of adherents are Evangelical Protestants; the blue states are ones where the plurality of adherents are Catholics. (Yellow states have Mainstream Protestants as the plurality, while green states have "Other" as a plurality, which clearly means Mormon in those three states.) Noticing any particular similarities between this map and the political "red" and "blue" states? Only four of the states with an evangelical plurality went for Barack Obama in the 2012 election (Florida, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington), and similarly only four of the states with a Catholic plurality went for Mitt Romney (Arizona, Louisiana, Montana, and Nebraska).
Religion map
These data are from the Association of Religion Data Archives, who do a decennial census of the country's religious adherents, a topic that, of course, the Census Bureau doesn't address. (The 2010 data may well have been available for several years, but I just stumbled across it this week.) It's worth noting that their numbers are limited only to persons who actually belong to congregations that they were able to contact. So in all but the couple most religiously-fervent states, "Unclaimed" is a larger category than any particular religion, encompassing not just non-believers but also those not actively involved in an officially-recognized congregation. (Can't say that I care for the loaded phrase "unclaimed" either -- makes it sound like lost luggage waiting to be picked up at the airport.)
Because of the way "Unclaimed" dominates almost every state, I left it out of the analysis, which kind of skews the results in those northwestern and New England states where the unchurched are most likely a plurality anyway; for instance, you certainly don't think of Alaska, Oregon, and Washington as being dominated by evangelicals (if anything, those states' red status speaks only to the even-greater absence of Catholics in those states). Nevertheless, if you're curious, though, the states with the highest "Unclaimed" percentages are Maine, Oregon, Vermont, Alaska, and Nevada. In fact, if you're really curious, I've turned the whole dataset into a Google Doc.
12:22 PM PT (David Jarman): Polltopia: Mark Blumenthal of HuffPo Pollster has periodically chipped away at the many flaws surrounding Gallup's polling that surfaced before and after last year's election; now he's put together a pretty definitive overview of everything that might have gone wrong for the once-vaunted pollster, that's well worth a full read. You've probably heard the main contentions before, especially that overly-restrictive likely-voter screen turned away younger voters who wound up voting. It also has some new insights into their sampling techniques, though, like their decision to shift to calling landlines only from electronic directories. Trying to save money on random-digit dialing means missing entirely households with unlisted landlines and no cellphone: a small segment of the population, but a decidely pro-Obama one.
1:48 PM PT: SC-01: Pre-primary fundraising reports are out for the South Carolina 1st District special, and the Washington Post has some highlights. On the GOP side, ex-Gov. Mark Sanford took in $334K over the last couple of months, but Teddy Turner actually beat him with $376K, though $245K was from his own pockets. And indeed, all of the notable current and former state legislators running—Sen. Larry Grooms, Rep. Chip Limehouse, and ex-Sen. John Kuhn—have all loaned themselves six figure sums ($100K, $400K, and $500K respectively).
Meanwhile, the lone noteworthy Democrat in the race, Elizabeth Colbert Busch, raised well, pulling in $310K with over $200K on hand. She's also out with her first ad, a semi-biographical spot that focuses on jobs and, in particular, her experience in the local shipping industry. Sanford also has a new spot (his third), focusing on fiscal conservatism, while Kuhn has an ad (available at the same link) attacking Sanford, Grooms, and Limehouse all together for allegedly supporting a "a massive earmark spending bill." Unlike in the recently-concluded IL-02 primary, there's actually been quite a bit of action on the airwaves here, so if you'd like to see a complete roundup, the Cook Report has you covered (PDF).
2:05 PM PT: AZ-Gov: His name had come up before on lists of possible Republican candidates, but now Mesa Mayor Scott Smith confirms that he's taking a "very, very close look" at next year's gubernatorial race. (Last cycle, he considered a bid for Congress but never pulled the trigger.) Smith sounds like he might be a quirky fit for the Arizona GOP, though, having expressed some hostility toward the state's punitive anti-immigration laws and tentative support for increased background checks for gun buyers. I'm not sure how he'd win a primary like that, but Arizona has some quirky dudes.
2:25 PM PT: IL-Sen: I won't be satisfied for sure until we hear it directly from the horse's mouth, but it looks like at least one veteran Democratic senator won't be retiring. The Chicago Tribune, relying on unnamed sources, says that Dick Durbin "is telling top Democrats he will seek a fourth term in 2014."