Democratic Rep. Ami Bera
Leading Off:
• CA-07: On Wednesday, Democratic Rep. Ami Bera took the lead for the first time. An additional 22,839 ballots (more than we believed were still out) were counted and Bera moved from a 530-vote deficit to a 711-vote edge.
There are about 19,000 ballots left in Sacramento County, which contains the entire district. About 58 percent of county voters cast a ballot in this district, so we estimate that there are 11,000 in the 7th District. On Friday more mail ballots are scheduled to be processed. However, the provisionals will take longer to verify and count: County election officials say it will be another week before all the ballots are counted.
Republican Doug Ose would need to win the remaining votes by about 7 points to pull ahead. The problem for Ose is that he's been losing ground since election night, and he'll need the remaining late ballots to be much redder than any of the other batches. Democrats shouldn't pop the Champagne just yet, but it looks like Bera may have prevailed in 2014's most expensive House race.
Late Calls:
• AK-Sen: On Tuesday, 17,000 additional ballots were counted statewide. Republican Dan Sullivan's lead over Democratic incumbent Mark Begich slipped only 238 votes, not nearly enough for Begich to win. Most media outlets called the race for Sullivan by Wednesday morning, though Begich has not conceded. Pretty much all the remaining ballots would need to come from Begich's stronghold in rural Alaska for him to have a shot at winning, and that looks very unlikely.
• CA-26: On Wednesday Ventura County, which makes up the vast majority of this swing district, counted another 20,550 ballots. Democratic Rep. Julia Brownley more than doubled her overall lead, going from a 1,030-vote edge over Republican Jeff Gorell to 2,370. There were about 40,000 uncounted ballots before this update so there are probably roughly 20,000 left. Gorell would need to win them by about 12 points: Given that he's been falling behind since election night, this doesn't look particularly likely. Gorell has not conceded but multiple media outlets have called this for Brownley.
• NY-25: Our long Upstate New York nightmare is over: On Wednesday, Republican Mark Assini conceded to Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter. The new ballots boosted Slaughter's lead from 582 to 869 votes, still an embarrassingly close finish for a longtime incumbent who was almost universally viewed as safe.
Uncalled Races: Several races remain uncalled as of Wednesday evening. We recently ran through them here and here is an update for each race where we have new information. You can check who has won each key race at our uncalled races tracker.
• AK-Gov: While Republicans were clinching the Senate seat, Republican Gov. Sean Parnell's fortunes were moving in the opposite direction: Independent Bill Walker's lead over Parnell grew by 839 votes and now stands at 4,004. There are about 33,400 ballots left, though election officials say more can come in before the Friday deadline.
The math looks pretty tough for Parnell, especially since he lost far more ground than Sullivan. The next round of counting is scheduled for Friday. It's not clear when all the ballots will be tabulated, though the state hopes they'll have the results certified by Nov. 28—two days before the gubernatorial inauguration is scheduled.
• VT-Gov: Republican Scott Milne, who finished about 2,500 votes behind Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin, says he won't seek a recount, given how "unlikely" it would be to change the results. (He's right.) However, because neither candidate won a plurality, state legislators will choose the next governor in January. The same thing happened in 2010, and Vermont's Democratic-dominated legislature easily awarded the governorship to Shumlin, who, then as now, won a plurality of the votes.
However, Milne is making noises that suggest he might ask lawmakers to break with tradition and pick him anyway, even though the last time the legislature selected anyone other than the plurality winner for governor was 1853. (It did happen more recently in a race for lieutenant governor back in 1970, but there, the leading candidate was dogged by corruption allegations.) He's planning some sort of announcement next week, so we'll see what kind of argument, if any, he tries to make.
• AZ-02: On Wednesday the final ballots (including 208 newly discovered votes) were added to the count, giving Republican Martha McSally a 161-vote lead over Democratic Rep. Ron Barber. A mandatory recount will be ordered, and we won't have a final result until December. McSally has declared victory but Barber is not conceding.
• CA-16: On Wednesday the Fresno County portion of the district counted another 2,589 ballots. Democratic Rep. Jim Costa was depending on Fresno to put him over the top and for now it has: After trailing by 741 ballots, Costa now leads Some Dude Republican Johnny Tacherra by 86 votes. There are reportedly 600 mail-in ballots and 10,000 provisionals left in all of Fresno County: We estimate that about 2,300 of them are in the district.
It could take more than a week for all the ballots to be validated and counted, so it may be a while before we have a resolution. We know that Tacherra-friendly Madera and Merced have 722 and 1,505 ballots left to count respectively. Assuming the remaining votes break the same way the rest of their counties have, Costa should net about 240 more votes. This race should not be anywhere near as close as it is, and Costa's own complacency is largely to blame for this photo finish, but it looks like the congressman is on track to pull off a narrow win anyway.
Senate:
• IL-Sen: By all rights, GOP Sen. Mark Kirk, who defeated a weak Democratic candidate in a huge Republican year, should be a big target for Team Blue in 2016. First, though, they need to find a candidate. Rep. Tammy Duckworth, who just won re-election last week to a second term, would be an appealing option, but she's about to have her first child and apparently isn't so keen on the idea. Other alternatives include Rep. Bill Foster (who'd be great) and state Sen. Kwame Raoul, who represents Barack Obama's old seat and has grown increasingly prominent in recent years.
Attorney General Lisa Madigan is a longer-shot possibility, but she has consistently refused to take the leap to higher office, so it doesn't pay to spend a lot of time focusing on her. And Greg Hinz offers one truly out-there possibility: Gov. Pat Quinn, who was just defeated last weak by Republican Bruce Rauner. Supposedly, some unhappy Chicago aldermen want Quinn to run against Mayor Rahm Emanuel, but with the filing deadline scarcely 10 days away, that seems implausible. And given how unpopular Quinn is, another statewide bid would be quite painful. But who knows?
• LA-Sen: With Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu looking like the clear underdog ahead of the Dec. 6 runoff, Senate Democrats are preparing a Hail Mary (pun kind of intended): Next week, the chamber will vote on Landrieu's bill to build the Keystone Pipeline. Democrats' hope is that if the bill passes, Landrieu can remind voters how influential she is on energy issues.
Unsurprisingly the House Republican leadership is quickly moving to mitigate any political advantage for Landrieu. They are planning to vote on a Keystone bill... only it will be Republican Bill Cassidy's version. Landrieu is trying to use this issue to argue that she can be much more effective on energy issues than her Republican rival, but the GOP is definitely going to ensure that Cassidy gets credit if the project goes forward.
Of course, if Senate Democrats really think that Landrieu can win, they should send some commercials her way. Right now Cassidy and his allies are dominating the airwaves: For every Landrieu ad, there have been 24 Republican spots.
• NV-Sen: Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid will be up for re-election in 2016 and there's no question which Republican is at the top of the NRSC wish list. Sen. Dean Heller and other Senate Republicans are working hard to convince Gov. Brian Sandoval to run. Sandoval has proven to be incredibly popular in this light blue state, and Democrats couldn't even recruit a remotely credible candidate to run against him this year. Sandoval seems very reluctant to take the plunge, but national Republicans are going to do everything they possibly can to change his mind.
• VA-Sen: One thing we've been wondering about ever since election night is where the hell were all the GOP internals? In almost every single race, the polling averages were heavily skewed toward the Democrats, so if Republican candidates had better numbers, why weren't they sharing them to at least push back against the prevailing narratives? With a couple of rare exceptions, though (like Larry Hogan's survey in the Maryland gubernatorial race), we really didn't see any.
And that may be because there weren't any. According to the Washington Post, Ed Gillespie's final poll, conducted three weeks before the election, found him down double digits to Democratic Sen. Mark Warner. That may well have saved Warner, because if Gillespie had been able to convince national Republicans that an upset was brewing, additional resources could have tilted the 1-point final outcome in his favor.
Warner's camp, meanwhile, claims they did know the race would be a nail-biter, but they wanted to project an aura of inevitability that would keep Gillespie's erstwhile allies out. That choice, though, became a two-edged sword, because it wound up suppressing enthusiasm for Warner since everyone figured he was going to win handily.
Still, though, you have to wonder why Republicans couldn't come up with more favorable data—which also would have been more accurate data! You'd think that Tom Cotton would have wanted to drive a few nails into Mark Pryor's coffin with polling showing him up 15 points, but we never saw anything like that. So were GOP firms all over-correcting for their heavy Republican biases in 2012? Or did some of these races break so late that polling couldn't capture the movement in time? Unless some Republican pollsters start sharing their private data, we may never know.
Gubernatorial:
• ME-Gov, 02: Democrat Mike Michaud has been pretty silent since he lost to Republican Gov. Paul LePage last week, but there's plenty of speculation about his future. While there's always a possibility that Michaud will just close the door on elected office, there is talk of him making another run for governor in 2018 when LePage is termed out.
Interestingly, there hasn't been much chatter about him running for his old seat against Republican Rep.-elect Bruce Poliquin. It is pretty rare for former representatives to try and regain their House seats after failing to win a promotion, but it's far from unheard of. One recent example is Republican Rep. Steve Pearce, who retook his New Mexico district in 2010 after losing a Senate bid two years before.
• MS-Gov, LG: Mississippi Democrats don't have much of a statewide bench, but one potential candidate may be making a move. Northern District Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley is holding a Washington fundraiser with big names like former Gov. William Winter and Rep. Bennie Thompson, and he's been raising his profile around the state for a while. Presley's being coy about his intentions but there is plenty of speculation that he'll run statewide in 2015, possibly for governor or lieutenant governor.
Gov. Phil Bryant and Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves are up for re-election next year, and neither Republican appears to have done anything to put them in jeopardy in such a conservative state. Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood has not announced if he'll seek another term yet though; if he steps aside, it'll probably be easier for Presley to take his place than to try and knock off a Republican incumbent.
House:
• NE-02: Brad Ashford's victory over GOP Rep. Lee Terry was one of the biggest—hell, one of the only—bright spots for Democrats on election night, and it's no surprise that Republicans are already painting a target on Ashford's back. Barack Obama narrowly carried the Omaha-based 2nd District in 2008 (famously winning a single electoral vote, too), but the seat reverted to form in 2012, going for Mitt Romney by a 53-46 margin.
Ashford was able to defeat Terry because of the incumbent's deep unpopularity, including shtick that pissed off average joes and fire-breathing conservatives alike. But now Ashford sits in one of the reddest districts held by a Democrat, so of course Republicans are looking for revenge. Tea partier Chip Maxwell, a former state legislator who very nearly ran as a splitter campaign as true-believer independent this year, already says he's going to seek the GOP nomination in 2016.
But other, stronger Republicans are likely to jump in as well. However, with presidential-year turnout, Ashford may not be that easy to unseat, especially if the Democratic nominee for president decides to make a play for Omaha's electoral vote just as Obama once did.
• DCCC: Democratic Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III, who just won re-election to a second term last week, says he is "not pursuing" the chairmanship of the DCCC, reportedly despite entreaties that he consider the job. Kennedy is just 34 (dude was born in 1980!), but of course he has a legendary family name and has already proven himself a strong fundraiser. But he has a long career ahead of him, and if he wants the gig in the future, it'll be his for the taking.
Grab Bag:
• Deaths: Longtime Republican Rep. Marge Roukema died on Wednesday at the age of 85. Roukema's personal story reflects the hard-right turn her party has taken over the last several decades. Roukema was swept into office during the Reagan revolution of 1980 and represented northern New Jersey for 22 years, but even though she took office at the same time as the Gipper, she was generally a moderate.
Toward the end of her career, the ultra-conservative Scott Garrett began to challenge Roukema biennially in the GOP primary, coming very close to victory in both 1998 and 2000. But redistricting then made the 5th District even more conservative, prompting Roukema to retire. Garrett secured the Republican nomination in 2002—though Roukema refused to endorse him—and he's held the seat ever since, all the while compiling one of the most far-right voting records of any member of Congress. It's a very different party than the one Roukema once knew.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, with additional contributions from Jeff Singer, David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Taniel, and Dreaminonempty