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Leading Off:
• NYC Mayor: Whether you went to bed early or late on Tuesday night, you went to sleep not knowing whether Public Advocate Bill de Blasio had officially cleared the crucial 40 percent mark in the Democratic primary, which would allow him to avoid a runoff with the second-place finisher, 2009 nominee Bill Thompson. And as of Wednesday evening... we still don't know what's going to happen. With 99 percent of precincts reporting, de Blasio sits at 40.33 percent, but of course, there are more votes left to count.
The Board of Elections says it will re-canvass voting machine tallies starting on Friday, but they won't begin opening paper ballots (which would include absentee and provisional ballots) until Monday. Given how soon a runoff would be held—Oct. 1—this lethargy would be remarkable if it were anyone other than the notoriously incompetent New York City BoE.
De Blasio declared victory, but Thompson is promising to continue his campaign, even though powerful Democratic interests are pushing him to concede. In any event, Thompson thinks the final vote won't be resolved until the end of next week, so for now, we wait.
Looking back at the election, the New York Times has put together an exceptional interactive map of Tuesday night's results in New York City, which allows you to filter returns by race, income, or home ownership. As you'd expect, Comptroller John Liu did well in heavily Asian areas, while City Council Speaker Christine Quinn performed best on Manhattan's wealthy (and white) East Side. And ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner's top precincts were... pretty much non-existent.
But the real story unfolds when you click the link to highlight "black areas," which shows that de Blasio dominated Thompson in the most heavily African-American precincts. Indeed, in areas that are at least 50 percent black by population, de Blasio won 47-34, about the same as his citywide margin. If Thompson was counting on racial affinity to power his campaign, he evidently miscalculated, but he should have known better, because this isn't the first time we've seen a more liberal white candidate perform better with black voters than a more centrist black candidate. (A good example would be Ron Sparks's win over Artur Davis in the AL-Gov Democratic primary in 2010.)
The Times's Michael Barbaro also has a very good post-mortem on the campaign strategy that led to de Blasio's surge. Interestingly, de Blasio did not send a single mailer but rather devoted all his resources to television, where he outspent his rivals by $200,000, despite every candidate abiding by a spending cap. Given the massive success the ad featuring his son Dante enjoyed—and, you know, the election results—it certainly seems like this was the right move.
Senate:
• KY-Sen: Democratic pollster Lake Research conducted a survey of the Kentucky Senate race for the Public Campaign Action Fund, a campaign finance reform group, and they shared the toplines with the Washington Post. The poll has Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes leading GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell 46-40, which seems optimistic to the point of being almost implausible. There were also a couple of weird things about the poll, like the fact that it was in the field for 11 days last month, and that it had a monstrous 5,000-voter sample, which Mark Blumenthal thinks "implies microtargeting" was a goal of Lake's.
• NJ-Sen: You expect to see Newark Mayor Cory Booker leading his Republican opponent, former Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan, but by this much? Rutgers-Eagleton has Booker up 64-29. That's by far the widest edge any pollster has given Booker to date, but then again, the tightest anyone's seen the race is 16 points, so it's not like anyone thinks it's close.
Gubernatorial:
• ME-Gov, -Sen: A new automated poll (PDF) from the Maine People's Resource Center—their first of the cycle—brings good news for Dem Rep. Mike Michaud, and also matches PPP's recent survey of next year's gubernatorial race. In a three-way race, Michaud has a 40-34 lead over GOP Gov. Paul LePage, with independent Eliot Cutler trailing at 17. (In a direct matchup, Michaud stomps LePage 56-36.) Last month, PPP had Michaud 39, LePage 35, and Cutler 18. If Republicans (or Cutler) have more optimistic polling, they haven't shown anyone.
In the unlikely event that Cutler were to change gears and challenge GOP Sen. Susan Collins instead, MPRC finds him getting destroyed, 60-26. Even PPP did not find such bleak numbers for this pairing, with Collins leading "only" 53-33.
• NC-Gov: Ah, fun stuff. While polls taken three years in advance don't have much predictive value, PPP's first 2016 head-to-heads featuring Republican Gov. Pat McCrory are undoubtedly designed to reinforce the growing narrative that the incumbent is flailing, badly. PPP pitted McCrory against four potential Democratic opponents—Attorney General Roy Cooper, state Treasurer Janet Cowell, state Sen. Josh Stein, and former Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker—and finds him trailing by anywhere from 2 to 6 percent, and stuck at 42 or 43 in every case.
McCrory's job approval rating is also now a lousy 35-53, so these results certainly make sense. But Democrats will need to be both lucky and good for McCrory to still look this way three years from now.
• NH-Gov: Attorney Brad Cook is the latest Republican to float his name for a possible gubernatorial bid, and he sounds pretty well-connected—he was the former law partner of the late Sen. Warren Rudman, for starters. But he also sounds like he hails from the same extinct school of moderate New England Republicanism that Rudman was an exponent of, given that he opposes New Hampshire's infamous anti-tax "pledge" that nearly all statewide office seekers are bullied into taking (and certainly all Republicans accept with glee). So I can't see how he'd win a GOP primary, except in a very split field.
House:
• ID-02: In the previous Digest, we mentioned a new radio spot from Rep. Mike Simpson, targeting his GOP primary opponent, Bryan Smith. Simpson's campaign claimed it was a "a significant district wide buy," but Roll Call's Abby Livingston reports that it was for just $6,500 at most. Seriously, don't make shit up when talking to reporters.
• MA-06: The House Ethics Committee voted to close its investigation of Rep. John Tierney, whose wife, Patrice, received over $200,000 from her brother Robert Eremian that she had reported as a gift rather than income. (Eremian, a federal fugitive, was convicted of running an illegal gambling operation, while Patrice Tierney pleaded guilty three years ago to charges that she aided her brother.) The House had been looking into whether the Tierneys had "intentionally mischaracterized" the payments to Patrice but found the evidence "inconclusive."
Ethical allegations regarding what he knew of his wife's activities featured heavily in Tierney's last campaign, which he barely survived, even though no one has ever linked him to any wrongdoing. But I suspect that despite the ethics committee's decision, this topic won't disappear from the campaign trail.
Other Races:
• CO Recall: Following Tuesday's recall elections in Colorado, where two Democratic state senators were turfed out and replaced by Republicans, PPP's Tom Jensen revealed something very unusual. It turns out that he took a poll of ex-state Sen. Angela Giron's 3rd District over the weekend, but because he didn't believe it yielded accurate results, he decided to sit on it. Even more unusually, Jensen then chose to reveal the data after the fact, because it turned out to be dead-on.
PPP found voters supporting a Giron recall by a 54-42 margin, identical to the actual 56-44 spread she was recalled by. Jensen says he didn't release the poll because he couldn't believe that a Democrat would perform so poorly in a district Barack Obama carried by almost 20 points last year (numbers which Daily Kos Elections calculated). In a follow-up post, Jensen adds that he also couldn't accept the notion that a third of self-identified Democrats supported the recall, as the poll found.
But Jensen's instincts were wrong, and the poll does shed some interesting light on what went down:
What's interesting about our poll is that it didn't find the gun control measures that drove the recall election to be that unpopular. Expanded background checks for gun buyers had 68/27 support among voters in the district, reflecting the overwhelming popularity for that we've found across the country. And voters were evenly divided on the law limiting high capacity ammunition magazines to 15 bullets, with 47% supporting and 47% opposing it. If voters were really making their recall votes based on those two laws, that doesn't point to recalling Giron by a 12 point margin.
We did find on the poll though that voters in the district had a favorable opinion of the NRA by a 53/33 margin. And I think when you see the final results what that indicates is they just did a good job of turning the election more broadly into do you support gun rights or are you opposed to them. If voters made their decision based on the actual pretty unobtrusive laws that Giron helped get passed, she likely would have survived. But the NRA won the messaging game and turned it into something bigger than it was—even if that wasn't true—and Giron paid the price.
Much like the Affordable Care Act, the individual parts of Colorado's new gun safety laws poll well. But when conservatives depict the entire effort as a whole, they're able to convince voters that the legislation represents a direct incursion against their freedoms—a "government takeover over healthcare" with Obamacare, and anti-second amendment gun-grabbing with the Colorado regulations. The NRA has decades of experience at portraying even the most innocuous gun law as a harbinger of jack-booted thugs banging down the doors of ordinary citizens, and it seems that they succeeded once again.
On a meta note, PPP has come under a lot of criticism (much of it on Twitter) for withholding this poll in the first place. You can check out the brouhaha for yourself if you like, but I'd only note that Jensen could have taken the easy route and never published this poll at all.
P.S. Joshua Spivak, who runs a site called the Recall Elections Blog, offers several points worth considering in the wake of Tuesday's elections. In particular, compared to the last time these two seats were up in 2010, turnout was down 17 percent in Giron's district and 36 percent in state Sen. John Morse's. As Spivak notes, that's not likely to obtain again in 2014, when Republicans will have to defend both seats.
• Special Elections: In addition to all of the races taking place in New York, Colorado, and elsewhere Tuesday night, there were a couple of legislative specials in the Bay State. Johnny Longtorso recaps:
Massachusetts House, 6th Bristol: This one was actually a close one. Democrat Carole Fiola held the seat for her party, defeating Republican David Steinhof by a 53-47 margin.
Massachusetts House, 16th Worcester: This one was not close. Democrat Dan Donahue defeated Republican Carol Claros by a 64-36 margin to keep the seat in the Democrats' column.
That 6th Bristol seat
went 69-30 for Obama last year (almost the same, actually, as 16th Worcester), so it's remarkable that the Republican kept it so close. Democrats also
held a third seat that Republicans did not contest.