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Senate:
• ME-Sen: This looks like a really great catch by blogger Giovanni Hashimoto: Democratic state Rep. Jon Hinck, who previously said he was "seriously considering" a run against Sen. Olympia Snowe, has posted a job listing for a finance director to a large online message board called JobsthatareLEFT. (You may need to be a member to see that link.) Most listings on that site try to obscure who is doing the hiring, but the reply-to email address is from "jonhinck.com," so it looks like he is staffing up for real.
• NJ-Sen: Tim Smith, CEO of a financial services firm and a councilman in the township of Roxbury, says he's considering running as a Republican against Sen. Bob Menendez. Smith is supposedly "very rich," according to the linked article.
• NV-Sen: PPP's Democratic primary numbers seem to have slipped through the cracks from last week, but they're more comical than newsworthy: Shelley Berkley leads Byron Georgiou by a 71-6 margin, amazingly enough up from 65-8 in April.
• OH-Sen, OH-04: I'm sure you recall the delightful aroma of cat fud that burst forth after Republican Study Committee chair Jim Jordan publicly humiliated Speaker John Boehner during the debt ceiling debate, which led to speculation that Jordan's district could get stuffed into one of those giant woodchippers you see prowling the streets after Christmastime. That got Ken Blackwell excited, because he likes the idea of Jordan running for Senate instead. And now the Ohio Democratic Party points to another compelling tea-leaf:
Midyear state campaign-finance reports showed that [Jordan] was the only one of Ohio’s 13 GOP congressional members not to contribute to the Ohio House Republican campaign fund. The other 12 donated a total of $164,766, in amounts ranging from $5,000 to $17,315.
It was expected that congressional members would give generously to the Ohio House campaign committee because GOP state lawmakers will be redrawing their districts this year.
Failing to pay your protection money is never a good idea.
• UT-Sen: The Jason Chaffetz watch is getting pretty tiresome, so it's not exactly a surprise that the Republican congressman is conducting four town halls across the state — all outside of his congressional district. Just announce already, sheesh.
Gubernatorial:
• IL-Gov: Venture capitalist and mega-rich guy Bruce Rauner, who employed Rahm Emanuel after he left the Clinton White House in the 1990s, is apparently exploring a run for governor… in 2014… as a Republican.
House:
• CA-25: Podiatrist Lee Rogers says he'll run for Congress in the new 25th CD as a Democrat, which is currently home to GOP Rep. Bud McKeon.
• NH-01: Businessman and state party finance chair Andrew Hosmer announced his entry into the Democratic primary for the right to take on freshman Frank Guinta. Hosmer, who lost a state Senate race last year, joins ex-Rep. Carol Shea-Porter and Joanne Dowdell. More background on him
• NV-02: Two Reno TV stations — KTVN and KOLO — have yanked NRCC ads which falsely claim Dem Kate Marshall advocated for a $500 million tax increase.
• NY-01: Good news, sports fans! George Demos, the third wheel in last year's ultra-nasty Republican primary in the 1st CD, is back for another go-round with Randy Altschuler, who had declared for a rematch against Rep. Tim Bishop some time ago. It's hard to say if Demos will gain any traction with last year's no. 2, Chris Cox, seemingly out of the picture (Cox's dad Ed, the chair of the state GOP, has thrown in for Altschuler), but we can always hope for a redux of 2010's ugliness.
• SC-07: GOP state Rep. Thad Viers became the first person to announce his candidacy in South Carolina's new 7th District, situated in the Pee Dee region. (If you're curious about where that unusual name comes from, Wikipedia has more.) Joshua Miller also mentions some other possible names: state Rep. Alan Clemmons, state Sen. Luke Rankin, and former Lt. Gov. André Bauer. You may recall Bauer from his utterly disastrous run for the Republican gubernatorial nod last year.
Other Races:
• WI Recall: In case you missed it, Daily Kos conducted a final round of polling on the Wisconsin recall elections, and the ultimate result shows that the battle for control of the state Senate is simply too close to call. Click the link for full details. And while it should go without saying, we are most definitely liveblogging the elections tonight.
Grab Bag:
• Experts: Wired's Jonah Lehrer has an interesting interview with Philip Tetlock, a social scientist who has devoted his career to evaluating the worth of expert predictions. (I once wrote about Tetlock's work in the context of political predictions back in 2006.) After conducting a decades-long study, the bottom line is: most prognosticators suck. The full picture is fascinating, though, and I'm not doing Tetlock's work justice at all with this thumbnail summary. But I mention the story because Tetlock is now launching a new study with the goal of improving the quality of expert predictions, and he's enlisting the public's help. You can learn more and sign up here.
• National Popular Vote: This strikes me as pretty big news! Gov. Jerry Brown just signed a bill into law under which California would award its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote… but — and let me put this in boldface, before anyone freaks out — it will only take effect once states totaling 270 EVs also get on board. This sort of thing is called an interstate compact, a fairly common legal vehicle that enables states to work in concert on all kinds of things. (One example: The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.) With CA on board, nine states representing 132 electoral votes are now signed up, so we're almost halfway there.
• Passings: Mark Hatfield, the former governor and longtime former senator from Oregon, has passed away at the age of 89. Hatfield had a reputation as an actual moderate Republican, one of the very last.
• Trivia: A very handy PDF created by Greg Giroux will help those of you interested in the trivia question I posed yesterday to answer it — at least as far back as 1968.
Redistricting Roundup:
• KS Redistricting: Kansas Republicans are supposedly working on a plan that would move Kansas City from the 3rd CD into the ginormous (and rural) 1st CD, creating a massive district that would stretch from the state's northeastern corner all the way to its western border. This would, of course, make the swingish 3rd (held by Democrat Dennis Moore until last year) much redder, and bury KC in a super-red district with which it has nothing in common. Who knows if the map is real (though it was clearly created in Maptitude, not drawn on the back of a napkin), but if I were the GOP, I'd definitely be thinking about doing something like this. (After all, Obama narrowly won the current 3rd.)
• LA Redistricting: This seems like a serious mistake to me, but so be it: The head of Louisiana's Legislative Black Caucus says she doesn't think there will be a lawsuit over the state's new congressional map, which recently received DoJ approval. The group is instead focusing on the state House map.
• MD Redistricting, MD-06: It seems all but certain that Maryland Democrats will go for a 7-1 map, rather than the 8-0 most DKos Electioneers prefer. But the question now is which GOP-held district they'll target: freshman Andy Harris's 1st CD or geezer Roscoe Bartlett's 6th. We mentioned the divide (and who's on which side) in this post, but a new article in the Baltimore Sun adds another angle. Specifically, some Democrats believe that the western part of the state (principally Frederick) is trending bluer, which will make holding the seat further down the line easier. The piece also has a quote from state Sen. Robert Garagiola, who says he's following redistricting closely and is considering a challenge to Bartlett.