Republican Marilinda Garcia
Leading Off:
• NH-02: Well, the Club for Growth sure drafted quite the piece of work up in New Hampshire. State Rep. Marilinda Garcia, who just won the GOP primary to take on Democratic Rep. Annie Kuster, absolutely loves to holler about how awful Obamacare is, which is exactly what you'd expect from a cookie-cutter tea partier nominated with hefty Club support. Only the local public radio station just managed to get Garcia to choke pretty hard on those cookie crumbs:
But when asked about her own health care coverage, Garcia demurred.
Garcia: "I… that's my own issue."
NHPR: "So you don't want to say?"
Garcia: "No that's fine, I don't need to share everything."
NHPR: "I bet it will come up again. Probably that's something the media will want to know, with you making health care an issue in your campaign."
Garcia: "My constituents talk to me so I am not here running on my own issues. I am expressing what they come up with."
NHPR: "Is it fair to say you are not getting your health care through Obamacare, through the (federal) exchange?"
Garcia: "I don't need to talk about that. Thank you."
Oh! Oh, but you do! You do need to talk about that, Rep. Garcia, because if you're trashing our current health care system, you need to explain what your alternatives are. And if your personal "alternative" is, in fact, Obamacare, then your would-be constituents deserve to know. Garcia's campaign claimed after this disastrous interview that no, she's not covered under the Affordable Care Act, but if that's the case, why couldn't she just explain that at the time? And has she provided any proof? No, this one's not going to go away quite as readily as Garcia wishes.
Senate:
• GA-Sen, Gov: Two new Georgia polls came over the transom Friday, one from Abt SRBI on behalf of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the other from InsiderAdvantage for Fox 5 Atlanta. The AJC poll finds Republican David Perdue beating Democrat Michelle Nunn 45-41 in the Senate race, with Libertarian Amanda Swafford at 6. That's a turnaround for Perdue, who trailed 46-45 in May. IA, meanwhile, gives him an outsize 50-40 lead while Swafford takes 5, though that's not too far off his 47-40 advantage in August.
On the gubernatorial side, GOP Gov. Nathan Deal has just a slim 43-42 edge on Democrat Jason Carter according to the AJC while Libertarian Andrew Hunt hoovers up 7 percent of the remainder. Back in May, Deal was ahead 48-44. IA also sees a pretty close race, with Deal up 44-40 on Carter and Hunt again at 7, though that's little changed from last month, when Deal was on top 43-39.
Both surveys have sample issues, though: African-Americans constitute just 24 percent of Abt's respondents but make up a whopping 33 percent of InsiderAdvantage's. Both are unlikely to be correct. In 2010, a terrible year for Democrats, black turnout still managed to reach 28 percent, while in 2012, when Barack Obama was at the top of the ticket, it topped out at 30. So it's extremely unlikely to be much lower or higher than what either pollster says, and it's almost impossible to believe that Perdue's at 50 with an electorate that's one-third black.
But except for that one implausible result, all the others show all four major-party candidates well below the 50 percent mark. Should that still hold on Election Day, we'll see runoffs in both races, albeit at different times: Carter and Deal would square off again in December while Nunn and Perdue wouldn't go head-to-head again until January. And in either case, Democrats would be at a serious disadvantage, since many of their voters are less apt to show up for a runoff. No matter what the polls look like now, it's a very difficult problem with no good solution.
• IA-Sen: A new CNN/ORC poll finds Democrat Bruce Braley with a 49-48 lead on Republican Joni Ernst. While that's incredibly tight, it's also the highest vote share Braley's ever received. (Ernst has hit 48 before and even once clocked in at 49 in a Republican survey.)
And there's another reason Braley should feel good: CNN is once again showing a massive spread between likely and registered voters, with RVs supporting him by a hefty 50-42 margin. Now of course you might say that this represents a serious enthusiasm gap and Democrats should be worried, but as we've pointed out before, LV polls aren't necessarily more accurate than RV polls (in fact, they're often less so).
So if the real answer lies somewhere in between, then Braley is probably up a few points—something that Amy Walter says Republicans have been privately admitting. If Democrats can shove this seat just out of reach, then they can breathe a partial sigh of relief and get back to focusing on much more challenging turf like Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alaska.
• LA-Sen: The Senate Majority PAC leaked an internal poll taken by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner that gives Mary Landrieu a 2-point lead, 48-46, in a runoff against Bill Cassidy. That's not a big lead, and it's not a big improvement over a 48-47 lead in their previous internal (from May), but this one will be a game of inches; the main thing they may want to crow about is that Cassidy's favorable have dropped considerably, down to 24/39. They also look at the jungle primary and find Rob Maness, Cassidy's main GOP rival, in double-digits (though still far behind), with Landrieu 47, Cassidy 32, and Maness 13.
• NH-Sen: Eccentric law professor Larry Lessig didn't just light money on fire in his hopeless effort to help former state Sen. Jim Rubens win New Hampshire's GOP Senate primary on Tuesday. He also laid down with some very mangy dogs in order to do so. As William "Tuck" Tucker elaborates, Lessig's Mayday PAC, a group he created to promote campaign finance reform, donated $104,000 to a super PAC called Stark 360, which is run by an anarcho-libertarian gun nut named Aaron Day. Day also happens to a vocal opponent of finance reform and called a state-level proposal that Lessig campaigned for "The Incumbent Protection, Racketeering, and Nullification of the 1st Amendment Bill."
Stark only supported Rubens because they preferred any anybody but Scott Brown, who was far too squishy on guns for them. Lessig made common cause with the group regardless, given them a hundred grand to help stop the former senator from Massachusetts. Even though Lessig's effort didn't come close to working (Brown beat Rubens 50-23), a whole passel of New Hampshire progressives came down hard on him for picking this most disturbing of bedfellows. Lessig responded with characteric cluelessness:
We are not supporting the organization at all. We are supporting joint activities designed to benefit the common ground we have found—support for Jim Rubens in the Republican primary—and only that common ground.
Unfortunately for Lessig, that's not how politics works. You can't give money and lend legitimacy to a group of lunatics (who, among other things,
want to dismantle New Hampshire's government) just because you may share one goal in common. In fact, it's a perversely hypocritical move for an idealist who views himself as pursuing an "anti-corruption" agenda, since this kind of deal-making represents the height of cynicism. There are some people it's never okay to ally yourself with, and Aaron Day is exactly such a person.
And unsurprisingly, as community member DocDawg details, it doesn't even look like much of Lessig's money went to aid Rubens' cause at all. Stark's campaign signs pushed their own extremist message, chastising Brown for things like voting in favor of Wall Street regulation and Romneycare. (Is Lessig on board with that?) Stark also paid at least $20,000 for "GOTV" to a company called ARD Ventures—which just happens to be owned by Aaron Day.
All in all, this is a very embarrassing episode for Lessig, who proved that he's utterly in over his head when it comes to electoral politics. Lessig's donors should be pissed that he wasted so much of their money on a pointless cause like Rubens in the first place. But the fact that he aided and abetted ultra-conservative radicals like Stark 360 should really have Mayday PAC's supporters reconsidering altogether.
Gubernatorial:
• FL-Gov: Rasmussen: Charlie Crist (D): 42, Rick Scott (R-inc): 40 (Aug.: 42-41 Scott).
• HI-Gov: Rasmussen: David Ige (D): 40, Duke Aiona (R): 39, Mufi Hannemann (I): 14.
• IN-Gov: Ex-Sen. and ex-Gov. Evan Bayh had previously said he was unlikely to make a comeback bid next cycle, and he confirmed that Friday, announcing that he won't run for governor in 2016. Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott and 2012 nominee John Gregg are the most likely Democratic alternatives. And note that GOP Gov. Mike Pence hasn't yet confirmed he'll seek re-election, mostly because he's been busy flirting with a presidential run.
House:
• FL-02: No wonder why Republicans like Rep. Steve Southerland have been so successful in winning over women voters:
Asked to respond to the Democrats' criticism that he's anti-women, Southerland laughed and said: "I live with five women. That's all I'm saying. I live with five women. Listen: Has Gwen Graham ever been to a lingerie shower? Ask her. And how many men were there?"
• NY-19, 21: Siena College has two new polls of two upstate New York House seats, and both contain bad news for Democrats. In the 19th District, in the Middle and Upper Hudson Valley, Republican Rep. Chris Gibson holds
a massive 57-33 lead on Democrat Sean Eldridge, who's struggled to fend off carpetbagger accusations from day one. But while these numbers might seem particularly gaudy for Gibson, and while Siena does not have a great track record, they're very similar to the 56-29 Gibson advantage that Democratic pollster DFM Research
found in July. If Eldridge wants to argue that these results are bunk, he'll need to produce his own poll right away.
Meanwhile, the first public poll of the open 21st District, a sprawling seat in the North Country right up along the Canadian border, shows that Democrats will have a very hard time holding on to this seat. Republican Elise Stefanik is beating Democrat Aaron Woolf 46-33, while Green Party candidate Matt Funiciello takes a huge 10 percent of the vote. As David Jarman waggishly put it, if Greens won't vote for a documentary filmmaker/organic grocery store owner from Brooklyn—Woolf—then exactly what sort of Democrat will they vote for?
While it seems unlikely that Funiciello will actually perform quite so well on Election Day, a Green candidate managed to take a chunky 8 percent in the nearby 24th District last cycle. Democrats originally won this seat the infamous 2009 "Dede Scozzafava" special thanks to a split in the right-wing vote, so it's only karmic payback that they'd be held back thanks to the same phenomenon in reverse this time. But even if all the Green votes went to Woolf, he'd still trail Stefanik. Not good.
Grab Bag:
• Ideology: Been feeling a void in your life, with the nerdfight over polarization having gone on hiatus for a number of months? Well, it's back, at least in a fairly minor flareup. On Thursday at the Monkey Cage, L.G. Zigerell took issue with the idea that polarization has been a one-sided process that puts most of the blame on Republicans; people who push that point of view usually rely on DW-Nominate scores, which have stayed pretty stable over the decades for congressional Democrats but gotten more extreme for Republicans.
Zigerell offers two alternatives that show a more balanced polarization: one is Adam Bonica's CFscores (which are great, especially for pinning down the ideology of candidates who've never served in office before, but rely on only campaign finance donors, not voting behavior), and the other is Michael Bailey's system. Zigerell says the advantage of Bailey scores is that they use things other than congressional votes (like professed support for a Supreme Court opinion) to bridge gaps between legislators at serving at different points in time, which is important when talking about how parties evolve over the decades.
That earned a rebuke on Friday from DW-Nominate's Keith Poole, though. Poole reminds us that there are two systems within the DW-Nominate world (something that even poli sci experts often confuse): the standard DW-Nominate scores, which apply to each member for each cycle, and Common Space scores, which synthesize a score for each legislator across his or her entire career. Poole whips out the graphs that show that the asymmetric polarization (with the Republicans moving to the right while Democrats stay in place) is just as visible when talking about Common Space scores as when talking about true DW-N scores.
• President-by-LD: Stephen Wolf brings us interactive maps of Connecticut and Montana visualizing the results of the 2012 presidential election by state legislative district. You can find his previous maps here.
Connecticut has turned against Republicans at the federal level, but the GOP is still able to win blue state legislative posts in the Nutmeg State. Montana Republicans at the moment hold most of Romney's seats, but redistricting makes things uncertain.
Ads & Independent Expenditures:
• AK-Sen: Republican Dan Sullivan highlights his work combating domestic violence when he served as state attorney general. On the Democratic side, Planned Parenthood spends $211,000 here.
• AR-Sen: The DSCC again goes after Republican Tom Cotton on Social Security and Medicare. Senate Majority PAC also spends another $240,000 against Cotton.
• CO-Sen, NC-Sen: Planned Parenthood goes after both Republicans Cory Gardner and Thom Tillis on birth control. The spots are the same aside from changing the names and states. The ad is running for $400,000 in Colorado and $500,000 in North Carolina.
• GA-Sen: Democrat Michelle Nunn accuses Republican David Perdue of underpaying his female managers when he ran Dollar General.
• KY-Sen: Republican Mitch McConnell features clips of Beltway commentators describing him as effective.
• LA-Sen, NC-Sen: Apparently, the "National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee" not only exists, it has some money to burn on non-Ben Carson activities. The Republican group spends $219,000 in Louisiana and $277,000 in North Carolina.
• NC-Sen: National Democrats have spent months hitting Republican Thom Tillis on education cuts, and the DSCC keeps at it in their new spot.
• KS-Gov: Both candidates have a new ad here. Democrat Paul Davis decries Republican Gov. Sam Brownback's education cuts and pledges to reverse them. Brownback talks about the values he learned being raised on a farm, though he never mentions what those values are.
• MA-Gov: With the Democratic primary over, the RGA-backed CommonWealth Future is wasting no time going after Democrat Martha Coakley. The spot portrays welfare fraud as out-of-control, and accuses Coakley of having no plan to fix it. The ad then depicts Republican Charlie Baker as the person who will turn things around.
• MD-Gov: Republican Larry Hogan attacks Democrat Anthony Brown for the state's problematic Obamacare roll out.
• ME-Gov: Democrat Mike Michaud portrays himself as a bi-partisan problem-solver, contrasting himself to Republican Gov. Paul LePage's divisive style.
• AZ-01: The NRCC again goes after Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick. They use imagines of luggage to argue that Kirkpatrick is carrying Obama's baggage (hilarious, I know).
• AZ-02: Republican Martha McSally emphasizes leadership.
• CA-07: Defending Main Street shells out $100,000 for Republican Doug Ose.
• CT-05: Democratic Rep. Elizabeth Esty's spot portrays her as a friend for veterans.
• IA-03: Republican David Young is out with his second spot and fortunately for him (though unfortunately for us) it's far better than his bizarre first ad. This one portrays Young as a common-sense problem solver.
• IL-12: Democrat Rep. Bill Enyart talks about being a leader in Washington. Enyart starts by declaring you don't lead by being loud, a subtle jab at Republican opponent Mike Bost's famous temper.
• IL-13: Republican Rep. Rodney Davis accuses Democrat Ann Callis of lying about his record.
• IL-17: Democratic Rep. Cheri Bustos highlights her work helping a local veteran when he lost his pension.
• NY-01: Democratic Rep. Tim Bishop defends himself from Republican attacks on his ethics before tying opponent Lee Zeldin to polluters.
Frustratingly, the spot begins by declaring that "Tim Bishop is not under FBI investigation." Repeating the original accusation is always problematic: This kind of quote is only likely to keep the original attack in circulation. Viewers who had never seen the original Republican ad are likely to start to wonder, "What's this I hear about Tim Bishop being investigated by the FBI?"
• NY-24: The NRCC recently reserved $1.2 million for this Upstate New York seat, and they've rolled out their first spot against Democratic Rep. Dan Maffei. The spot accuses Maffei of taking advantage of taxpayer funded Washington perks, while praising Republican John Katko as a courageous prosecutor.
Until recently, this district hadn't been on many people's target lists. However, Katko has raised money well, and Maffei has begun to attack him. Obama won 57-41 here but Upstate New York has often been willing to vote for Republicans downballot. Maffei narrowly lost his seat in 2010 in a shocking upset, and Republicans are hoping that they can win here again. This time Maffei appears to be taking Katko much more seriously than he took 2010 foe Ann Marie Buerkle, but this race is worth watching. So far national Democrats haven't committed resources here but we'll see if that starts to change.
• PA-06: The National Association of Realtors spends $339,000 for Republican Ryan Costello and there's probably a lot more where that came from. The group has a history of backing both Democrats and Republicans and is willing to spend big to help its candidates.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, with additional contributions from Jeff Singer, David Jarman, and Steve Singiser.