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8:08 AM PT: MA-Sen: This strikes me as a major unforced error by Scott Brown:
"Let Scott Brown tell me to my face that I am nothing but a paid actor, and I'll set him straight on what it was like to watch my father suffocate to death," English said.
What's this all about? Well, this:
U.S. Sen. Scott Brown suggested Wednesday that his Democratic opponent Elizabeth Warren used actors in her advertisements defending the legal work she did on asbestos-related lawsuits.
But three of the people in the advertisements have said that's not the case.
That first quote comes from one of the people Brown slurred, and that's really, really not the kind of thing you want hounding you as you trail in the polls with less than three weeks before election day. That's why Brown issued a hasty apology on Wednesday night, but really, who put this bug in his ear in the first place? Was it an incompetent staff who didn't realize they were playing with fire? Or did Brown drink his own kool-aid and conclude that everything Warren does is somehow phony? And I have to wonder how much damage Brown just did to himself. I mean, this stuff is heart-breaking:
"Sam and I were childhood sweethearts and we had been together since I was 15 years old," Jackson said. "I came forward in this campaign because Massachusetts voters need to know the truth about what Elizabeth Warren did to help families like mine who were affected by asbestos poisoning, rather than Sen. Brown's misleading attacks."
You can view the ads
here and
here. I'm dumbfounded that anyone watching these could conclude the people in the ads were actors. But given how devastating these spots are, I can certainly see why Scott Brown wished they were.
8:37 AM PT: SD-AL: Hah, man, I love this new ad from Democrat Matt Varilek. His Republican opponent, freshman Rep. Kristi Noem, has been under fire for a long time for her terrible attendance record at meetings of the House ag committee—an assignment she specially sought. It turns out she's had a poor record of showing up for other meetings as well, and there's awesome footage of GOP Rep. Don Young berating her for playing on her smartphone at a session of the Subcommittee on Indian and Alaska Native Affairs. About halfway through the spot:
Chairman Young: Ms. Noem? Hello! Get of that machine, it'll drive you nuts! Abba jabba d'jabba
That last bit was a... challenge to transcribe. But I swear those sounds come out of his mouth! Such scorn, and from a member of her own party, inside the halls of Congress.
8:44 AM PT: CA-44: I'm a little curious as to why Janice Hahn decided to release this late September internal from FM3. I mean, I thought it was over after she won June's top-two primary 60-40 over fellow Dem Rep. Laura Richardson. And I thought it was really over when we learned the other day that Richardson had raised just $7,000 (no missing zeroes) in the entire third quarter. But Hahn's "only" up 43-27, with a sizable 30 percent undecided, which strikes me as less dominant than I'd have expected. Still, Richardson's clearly given up, so I don't think it matters much.
8:50 AM PT: CT-Sen (UConn): Chris Murphy (D): 44 (37), Linda McMahon (R): 38 (33); Obama 51-37 (53-32). UConn's last poll a month ago was really weird—as you can see, it had far too many undecideds in the Senate race. On the flipside, Obama's margin back then was the highest seen all cycle in Connecticut. Now he's fallen back down to earth. On the Senate front, though, the good news is that McMahon is trying to "unskew" the results, claiming: "Clearly, this poll oversampled Democrats and severely undersampled Independents." Mmhmm.
9:10 AM PT: TX-14: One of the more stunning sets of numbers in our quarterly fundraising roundup was GOP state Rep. Randy Weber's cash-on-hand total in Texas's open 14th District. Even though this is a conservative district that Republicans are favored to hold, Weber was outraised by ex-Rep. Nick Lampson $417K to $375K—and more remarkably, Lampson is absolutely killing him in terms of money in the bank, $422K to just $55K. That's a pitiful sum.
On top of that, Weber accepted $20,000 in contributions from seven donors who exceeded the $2,500/person federal donation limit. Weber's "explanation" is that his campaign "sent out reattribution letters so that contributions could be attributed to spouses or returned if necessary" and says he has 60 days to correct the problems. But are you getting that? Weber's copping to taking more money than he's permitted—and says he'll "fix" the problem after the election! And yet even with this chicanery, he's still badly in the hole.
The real question is, though, does Lampson have a chance? Thanks to Weber's incompetence, he just might. We've gotten our hands on a dusty Lampson internal from mid-August, but it's still instructive. In Anzalone Liszt's poll, Weber was leading 46-43. Now, that was down from a 44-40 Lampson edge in May (a poll we had in fact previously seen), but the timing's important: Weber had just won his party's runoff and had been spending heavily on paid media. Lampson had done none, since he already had the Democratic nomination in hand. I'd love to see more recent polling, but a heartening sign (as we recently mentioned) is that the House Majority PAC has started advertising here, so this race could yet surprise.
9:55 AM PT: FL-09: Okay, so the extremely well-finance Alan Grayson has a 56-41 lead over his penniless Republican opponent, Todd Long, in his new internal poll. Fine. But he really paid sketchball "pollster" Gravis Marketing to conduct it? On their website, Gravis tries hard to pretend like they aren't partisan, with vague client "testimonials" that avoid naming any actual campaigns or citing any political parties. But if you check out who they've worked for this cycle, you'll see that they are, in fact, a telemarketing firm, not a polling outfit, and that they've almost entirely served Republicans—including Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum!
That really tells you all you need to know, but there's still one more thing worth pointing out. Prior to 2012, "Gravis Marketing" comes up only once on Political MoneyLine's payee search. Who was their client? The oddly named "JTK for Congress"—or, if you Google a bit, Joseph Krysztoforski, a bizarre Some Dude conservative perennial candidate with a website to match. It really says a lot about Grayson that he'd hire a firm like this—and given how dodgy Gravis's polls have been this cycle, I can't say I trust the numbers one bit.
10:33 AM PT: VA-Sen (PPP for LCV): Tim Kaine (D): 50 (51), George Allen (R): 45 (44); Obama 49-48 (50-47). I think Sam Stein summed it up best:
PPP has Obama 49-48 in VA. this was pre-debate and pre rumors that obama is conceding the state, which will, of course, have to happen now
— @samsteinhp via TweetDeck
10:45 AM PT: HI-Sen: Republican Linda Lingle has put out the thinnest of polling memos, but even she acknowledges she's behind. Voter/Consumer Research supposedly has her back "just" 47-43 from Democrat Mazie Hirono, who derided the release as "just an incomplete paragraph that raises more questions than it answers."
10:47 AM PT (David Jarman): WA-Gov: "Unprecedented" gets thrown around a lot in the world of political hyperbole, but this may be genuinely unprecedented: a major newspaper running its own ads in its own pages supporting a political candidate. It's the Seattle Times, and they're calling their support (which started with a full-page ad on page B6 of the Wednesday edition) of Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna an 'independent expenditure' worth $75K.
Now their support of McKenna should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the Seattle Times, owned by the estate-tax-obsessed Blethen family. The Times has already endorsed McKenna on its editorial page (after previously endorsing Dino Rossi in the last two elections, and generally fetishizing all things moderate Republican for many decades) and has run subtly slanted news stories on the gubernatorial race as well. (Nor should it be surprising that the socially-liberal Times is also running $75K worth of ads supporting the state's same-sex marriage referendum to try to balance the scales, although they're calling that ad blitz an 'in-kind contribution' rather than an IE.)
What is surprising is that they would make their support of McKenna so transparent within the local news hole, in a way that seems to threaten whatever credibility the Times' newsroom has. The Times is referring to this as an experiment, however, designed to show the value of political advertising in newspapers (although there doesn't seem to be any sort of control group or anything that would seek to measure the effectiveness of such advertising).
“There is absolutely no interface between our news coverage and this effort: We realize some people may question the approach, but we hope they will give us the benefit of the doubt as we try an innovative approach to new revenue and, at the same time, raise awareness of the credibility and effectiveness of newspaper advertising for political campaigns,” Jill Mackie, the Times’ vice president for public affairs, said in an e-mail.
Now it seems like any added revenue from more political ads in the future would be more than offset by the damage this will do to their corporate brand... but maybe they decided their brand is already so inextricably linked with Northwest-style Republicanism that they figured that outing themselves wouldn't have any measurable bad consequences.
In other news from the Washington gubernatorial race, there's one more poll out giving Democrat Jay Inslee a solid lead; it's from Public Policy Polling, on behalf of Washington Conservation Voters. They find Inslee leading McKenna 48-42. The unusual number that's part of this poll is that Barack Obama is leading by only 5 in this poll, the closest any poll has seen the presidential race this cycle. The good news is that the gubernatorial race doesn't seem to be experiencing any downdraft; even half a year ago, when the gubernatorial race was looking very rough, who would have thought that at one point Inslee would be overperforming Obama?
10:52 AM PT: IL-08: A million here, a million there... and now I'm getting concerned. At first, I thought it was possible to laugh off Now or Never PAC's expenditures targeting Democrat Tammy Duckworth as a useless waste of money. But even in a heavily Dem district, and with an opponent like loudmouth GOP Rep. Joe Walsh, $2 million is a lot—and now the group says they plan to pour in another $2.5 million. Sheesh. They probably chose their words poorly, though, when they said they plan to "bury Duckworth." She fired back: "I wasn't buried in Iraq, and I won't be buried by Joe Walsh's Out-Of-State Right Wing Super PAC."
11:06 AM PT: MO-Sen: It's not the first time we've seen a talking political mailer (one popped up in the MO-01 Democratic primary, of all places), but this one is pretty awesome because it features clips of Todd Akin's greatest hits—including, of course, his legendary "legitimate rape" remark. You can actually watch (and hear) the mailer being opened at the link. American Bridge is behind it, spending $37K on distribution.
11:08 AM PT: OH-Sen (SurveyUSA): Sherrod Brown (D-inc): 43 (42), Josh Mandel (R): 38 (38); Obama 45-42 (45-44)
11:40 AM PT (David Jarman): NV-Sen: There are three, count 'em, three polls in Nevada today; let's work our way from bad news to good news. The worst news comes from Rasmussen, who find appointed GOP incumbent Dean Heller leading Dem Shelley Berkley 50-43, a bit wider than his 48-45 spread a couple weeks ago. Not much better is the poll from SurveyUSA on behalf of "Newspaper" (aka the Las Vegas Review-Journal); they find a 46-40 lead for Heller. On the other hand, that's improved from their poll two weeks ago (which was 47-39), and the crosstabs should also give you some hope, because Heller's six-point lead is predicated on him pulling a 48-40 lead among Hispanics (and that ain't gonna happen).
Finally, there's a poll from the Mellman Group on behalf of the Berkley campaign; they give Berkley a 41-38 lead (with 5 for the Independent American Party candidate, who, as with the Libertarian in the MT-Sen race, seems to be the difference-maker here). That's barely changed from last week's poll, which had it at 42-39 for Berkley. I always cast a jaundiced eye toward internals, but, as Jon Ralston is fond of pointing out, Mellman nailed 2010's race in their work for Harry Reid, while Rasmussen and SurveyUSA don't have strong Nevada track records.