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Leading Off:
• AK-Sen: The New York Times takes an interesting look at Democratic outreach among Native Americans in Alaska, who make up about a fifth of the state's population but are often difficult to reach as they're spread across the state's vast wilderness; tend to have low voter turnout; often deal with a lack of election materials printed in native languages; and don't typically divide their loyalties along traditional party lines. But native voters were a key bloc in electing Sen. Mark Begich in 2008, and Democrats are deploying an army of 130 field workers around the state to reach out to them this cycle.
A tireless campaign, Begich himself has traveled many miles to meet with native communities, and Democrats are also hopeful that their gubernatorial nominee, Byron Mallot, will drive up the native vote as he's an Alaska Native himself. However, the GOP frontrunner, Dan Sullivan, is married to a prominent native woman, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who will almost certainly stump on his behalf after the primary, is also very popular with native Alaskans, so both sides will undoubtedly make a play for this vote.
And speaking of Sullivan, he just released a new internal from Moore Information showing him tied at 43 with Begich, little changed from Begich's 44-42 lead in April. However, the same poll gives Sullivan a 39-30 lead on Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell, with 2010 nominee Joe Miller back at 13. While that might seem positive, Sullivan was up 38-22 two months ago, so Treadwell appears to be gaining. Democrats would very much like it if Treadwell could really make Sullivan sweat.
Senate:
• CO-Sen: Rasmussen: Mark Udall (D-inc): 43, Cory Gardner (R): 42 (March: 42-41 Udall).
• GA-Sen: A conservative super PAC called Citizens for a Working America spent a million bucks in the GOP primary trying to stop Rep. Jack Kingston, and now they're spending a million more, with the latest $500,000 installment posted just recently. Their new TV ads (assuming they aren't just recycling old material) aren't available online, though, and they don't have much of a website.
• KS-Sen: Tea partying physician Milton Wolf has struggled to gain traction in his primary challenge to GOP Sen. Pat Roberts, but he's hoping to turn that around with a $250,000 TV ad reservation running from this week through the Aug. 5 primary. That may sound like a fair amount, but Roberts has already spent twice that on television and will spend more. And while Wolf claims this is only an "initial" buy, it represents almost his entire cash-on-hand balance as of March 31, so unless his fundraising's been gangbusters over the last few months, he probably can't go too much bigger.
• KY-Sen: It sounds like Elizabeth Warren's rally with Alison Grimes over the weekend was a big smash:
The Warren appearance was greeted by an overwhelming crowd that with a line that stretched at least three blocks Sunday morning from the campus venue, the Red Barn.
Lots of photos here. Looks like it was standing-room only.
Gubernatorial:
• AZ-Gov: Veterans for a Strong America, a conservative group, has published the results of a new poll of Arizona's GOP gubernatorial primary, conducted by Harper Polling. VSA is connected to an ally of state Treasurer Doug Ducey though they don't appear to have endorsed him. However, they're obsessed with Benghazi and they've run negative ads attacking attorney Christine Jones, who once had something nice to say about Hillary Clinton. The group claims they've driven up Jones' negatives, but they've provided no trendlines, so there's no way to know. They do, however, have toplines:
Doug Ducey: 33
Christine Jones: 15
Scott Smith: 14
Ken Bennett: 12
Andy Thomas: 3
Frank Riggs: 2
Undecided: 22
There's been
very little polling of this race, but this is now the third survey in a row to put Ducey in front. However,
one of those polls was from McLaughlin, so .... Then again, all these numbers do cut against a report from a couple of months ago that indicated
Ducey was struggling—something Ducey himself did not dispute. He's since been on the air himself, though, so perhaps that's turned things around for him.
• FL-Gov: Gravis Marketing: Rick Scott (R-inc): 41, Charlie Crist (D): 39 (April: 44-43 Scott).
• MD-Gov: While "Democrat endorses Democrat" is seldom news in a general election, it's probably worth noting that state Attorney General Doug Gansler has given his backing to Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, the winner of last week's Democratic gubernatorial primary. Gansler being Gansler, you could certainly have imagined him doing something douchey, and he didn't attend a unity rally late last week, but he did offer his support to Brown. (Del. Heather Mizeur, the third candidate in the race, did show up at the rally and also endorsed Brown.)
House:
• GA-10: In a move that cuts against type, Rick Santorum has endorsed businessman Mike Collins, the son of ex-Rep. Mac Collins, in the July 22 GOP runoff in Georgia's 10th Congressional District. Collins faces pastor Jody Hice, whom you'd expect would suit the religiously fervent Santorum better, but Santorum did serve together in the House with the elder Collins for a little while back in the 1990s, so perhaps there's a connection there. Hice and Collins both took 33 percent in the first round of voting, with Hice just 270 votes ahead.
• LA-05: Well whaddya know. After getting caught on tape making out with a staffer, saying he wouldn't run again, then saying he might run again, GOP Rep. Vance McAllister will ... run again. Pretty much the entire Republican establishment called on McAllister to resign after his now-infamous video surfaced (including Eric Cantor!), but if there's one thing McAllister ain't, it's a member of the establishment. He rode to victory in last year's special election despite every GOP bigwig in Louisiana endorsing his opponent, state Sen. Neil Riser, so it figures that the powers-that-be have little sway over him.
But the voters will still get to have their say. A number of other Republicans (and some Democrats, too) have either said they'll run for McAllister's seat or have expressed interest in doing so. But that may be exactly what he wants. Riser passed on another run, and no single candidate looks like he has the stature to unite the electorate against McAllister. Louisiana requires runoffs if no one clears 50 percent, so McAllister can't rely on the clown-car effect to let him escape with a plurality. But a divided field still suits him, and he could very well return to Congress for another term next year. After all, David Vitter managed just that.
• NJ-05: A Garin-Hart-Yang internal for Democratic attorney Roy Cho finds him trailing GOP Rep. Scott Garrett by a 47-34 margin, with Cho of course highlighting the fact that Garrett is under 50 percent. The poll also includes some of the usual informed ballot tests, which naturally show Cho performing better after positive and negative messages are read. Cho's campaign is realistic, though, and his memo acknowledges that "we understand the difficulty of defeating an entrenched incumbent and recognize that Scott Garrett has several advantages at his disposal, including his higher name recognition."
Cho did manage to outraise Garrett in the first quarter, but Garrett stepped things up in the pre-primary fundraising period and holds a dominant cash lead, $2.9 million to just $303,000. The thing with Garrett, though, is that he's extremely conservative—much more so than you'd expect for a Republican representing a 51-48 Romney district. He was the only Northern congressman to vote against reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act back in 2006, and he even considered voting against Hurricane Sandy relief aid. It's the kind of record that could one day do him in if an opponent can ever get it to stick—but that's a very big if.
• WA-04: There hasn't been much discussion of the race to replace retiring Doc Hastings in this dark-red slice of eastern Washington, but it's one heckuva clown car, with eight Republicans, two Democrats, and two independents piled into the Aug. 5 top-two primary. Fortunately, we have the Yakima Herald-Republic's Mike Faulk to walk us through all the clowns.
The real race appears to be between former state Agriculture Director Dan Newhouse, the establishment candidate, and 2010 Senate candidate and ex-NFL star Clint Didier, the tea party's horse in the race, though what's unclear is whether they face off in the general, or if only one of them squeaks through the primary and faces Democrat Estakio Beltran, a former staffer for Sen. Maria Cantwell, in November.
Other Republican still have a shot. State Sen. Janea Holmquist Newbry seems like a good bet on paper, but she's hampered in that most of her Kittitas County-based district is now in the 8th District. And don't count out attorney George Cicotte, who's Mormon and could advance by consolidating the region's somewhat sizable LDS population. The article also briefly mentions a recent Didier internal taken by Team Telcom, but only to tell us that Didier leads Newhouse by 8 while a whopping 58 percent remain undecided. (David Jarman)
Grab Bag:
• Ads:
• NC-Sen: Senate Majority PAC continues to hammer Republican state House Speaker Thom Tillis on
education cuts.
• NM-Gov: Republican Gov. Susana Martinez goes after Democratic rival Gary King, this time over a 21-year old vote he cast against a bill that "allowed courts to garnish the wages of parents behind in child support payments."
• GA-11: Republican state Sen. Barry Loudermilk has a generic "Look at me, I'm a serious conservative who hates Obama!" ad. Disappointingly, it doesn't end with "Got Loudermilk?"
(Jeff Singer)
• Demographics: One of the best things that comes out of the Pew Research Center is their "typologies," which break Americans down into eight or nine political clusters. They revise the typologies every few years, and the newest installment came out last week, which we analyzed in detail on Sunday. (Daily Kos is pretty heavy on the "Solid Liberal" category, as you might expect; our online poll finds 84 percent of our readership belongs in that slot.) (David Jarman)
• House: Here's a great interactive map from Scott Bland at the National Journal. It tracks fall airtime reservations by House district, from both the NRCC and DCCC, with larger bubbles indicating larger ad buys. The only thing that would make it even better would be if it included reservations from other outside groups (like the House Majority PAC) and the campaigns themselves, though candidates on the House level haven't really started booking TV time for the stretch run yet.
• President-by-LD: Stephen Wolf brings us interactive maps of Alaska and Texas visualizing the results of the 2012 presidential election by state legislative district. You can find his previous maps here.
While the Texas legislature is very polarized (Democrats hold one Romney seat in each chamber and Republicans have no Obama districts), Alaska has a bit more crossover voting. Making things more interesting, several Democrats in both Alaska chambers are allied with the Republican majority. As Stephen notes, this is actually pretty normal for Alaska politics: Many Native American Democratic legislators side with whomever is in the majority in order to secure more influence for their constituents. (Jeff Singer)
• WATN?: Businessman Ben Suarez, who was charged with using his company's employees as straw donors to contribute to Republican state Treasurer Josh Mandel's Senate campaign in 2012, was found not guilty Monday on all but one charge. (He was convicted of witness tampering.) Mandel was never accused of wrongdoing, but he did send a letter drafted by Suarez to his counterpart in California, Democrat Bill Lockyer, accusing local prosecutors of engaging in "legalized extortion" against Suarez regarding allegations of consumer fraud. That case was settled earlier this year for $1.8 million.