Watching the drama unfold in the Kansas senate race has been fascinating the last month. If Senator Pat Robert (R-Crazy) ends up losing this seat, it may well end the dreams of the GOP taking over the U.S. Senate.
But with polls showing Dems behind in Kentucky and Georgia, which offer the best pick ups for Dems, and incumbent Democratic Senators in states like Louisiana and Arkansas struggling in the polls, a story I read this morning about the senate race in South Dakota really caught my eye.
The senate seat in South Dakota is an open seat with a Democratic incumbent deciding not to run for re-election. Every pundit on the planet has had this as a safe Republican pick up for the last year. Former Republican Mike Rounds is the GOP nominee for this seat, and widely expected to run away with this seat.
Both North Dakota and South Dakota have a long streak of voting for the GOP in presidential races. However, over the last three decades, both states have elected Democratic senators for years. And that streak continued in 2012 with Heidi Heitkamp winning a U. S. Senate seat in North Dakota.
Well, things have become quite interesting in the last couple of weeks in South Dakota. GOP nominee Rounds in dropping like a rock in the polls, due to questions about a contract his administration gave to administer a foreign visa, called the EB-5 program.
The EB-5 program provides long-term visas to immigrant investors in a particular state. State and federal investigators have been looking into the program since Rounds' cabinet secretary, Richard Benda, who awarded the contract for the program to a business associate after it was privatized, committed suicide in 2013. After Benda left office, he went to work for the company he awarded the EB-5 contract to.
Every Voice Action, another campaign finance reform group, has spent $350,000 against Rounds in the past month, pounding him on the airwaves with this ad:
In the meantime, former Republican Sen. Larry Pressler, running as an independent, entered this race earlier this year, but since the summer, his poll numbers have doubled.
The Democratic nominee is Rick Weiland, and from the beginning, his candidacy was controversial back in late spring. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has publicly trashed Weiland and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has not lifted a pinky to assist Weiland.
Weiland became the subject of a rare public feud between Reid and former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), for whom Weiland worked and who’s backing him in the race.
In an interview last summer, Reid declared Weiland is “not my choice.” A Reid aide confirmed Daschle met with the majority leader to discuss Weiland’s candidacy, but said he remains “skeptical.”
“Sen. Daschle has been an advocate for Rick Weiland; however, Sen. Reid is skeptical. In the end, it will be up to Rick Weiland to prove he is capable of winning the race, and that is going to take time,” the aide told The Hill.
“Like any other candidate, Rick needs to demonstrate that this is a winnable race. He is beginning to do that. If/when he does, I am confident that the DSCC will be very supportive,” Daschle told The Hill.
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A new PPP poll released on October 2, 2014, shows the race tightening, with Rounds losing more support:
The internal automated poll, conducted by Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, gives Rounds 35 percent support to 28 percent support for Weiland and 24 percent support for Pressler, while 8 percent support independent Gordon Howie.
That’s a decline in support for both Rounds, a former governor of the state, and Weiland since the Democrat’s last internal poll, conducted at the end of August. Then, Rounds took 39 percent support to Weiland’s 33 percent support, and Pressler drew 17 percent.
The polling memo written for Weiland’s campaign suggests the race could be a late-breaking opportunity for national Democrats, who largely wrote off South Dakota when they failed to recruit a strong challenger into the race. And Rounds does indeed look to be more vulnerable to defeat than initially expected in the deep-red state. He’s faced attacks over his role in the scandal surrounding an investments-for-visas program in the state.
Pressler seems to have taken 4 points away from Rounds and 5 points Weiland, when you compare this poll to the prior poll, but clearly Weiland has a shot at this race.
But while Harry Reid and his cronies at the DSCC sit around with their thumbs up their collective asses, while the opportunity of holding a seat all thought was lost slips away, out of the blue yesterday, a knight in shining armor steps in on Weiland's behalf in such a way that it could be a game changer in this race.
Mayday PAC, founded by Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig, is making its second-biggest foray into 2014 elections with a $1 million expenditure supporting Democrat Rick Weiland’s Senate bid in South Dakota.
Mayday PAC, founded by Lessig to prove that campaign finance reform is an issue that voters care about, in May announced it would try to crowdfund $6 million from small donors, matched by an additional $6 million from larger donors, to back candidates supporting public financing for elections. The effort earned financial support from tech moguls, including LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Facebook billionaire Sean Parker. The group received promotion from former Star Trek actor George Takei and artist Shepard Fairey. Mayday has raised nearly $8 million so far from more than 60,000 donors.
"Rick Weiland understands that as long as our representatives are held hostage to their funders -– and not the people -– the system will not work for Americans of either political party,” Lessig, a native of Rapid City, South Dakota, said in a statement on Tuesday. “It's up to us to take our government back, and that is Rick Weiland’s central campaign message."
The $1 million expenditure is part of planned $2 million campaign by a coalition of groups that includes Mayday, Communications Workers of America, Every Voice Action, Democracy for America and Progressive Campaign Change Committee. The multi-million dollar advertising contribution may have a big impact on a race that has been largely ignored by the two major political parties and major donors.
So, all told, the coalition of groups listed above is dumping a total of 2 million dollars into this race. And in a state where television, radio, and print advertising is some of the cheapest in the country, 2 million dollars is going to go a long way.
Here is the first ad MayDay Pac is running on Weiland's behalf. Keep this race on your radar and I'll provide an update in mid-October as to where things stand.