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8:08 AM PT: MD-Sen: According to nameless sources cited by the Washington Post, Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski, who has a press conference scheduled for 11 AM ET today, will announce her retirement. Mikulski, a Democrat, was first elected to the Senate in 1986; previously, she had served a decade in the House, making her the longest-tenured woman in congressional history.
Safely blue Maryland has not elected a Republican to the Senate since 1980, when Charles Matthias, the man Mikulski succeeded, won a final term. Interest in succeeding Mikulski will be high among Democrats, and potential candidates include (among others) Reps. Chris Van Hollen and Donna Edwards, as well as former Gov. Martin O'Malley. Undoubtedly more names will emerge soon as the jockeying begins in earnest.
As always, we'll be tracking all developments closely at Daily Kos Elections.
8:33 AM PT: Special Elections: Just one this week, per Johnny Longtorso:
Kentucky SD-27: This is an open Democratic seat located northeast of Lexington. The candidates, both lawyers, are Democrat Kelly Caudill and Republican Steve West. The district voted 61-37 for Mitt Romney in 2012 and 55-42 for Mitch McConnell in 2014.
8:45 AM PT (Jeff Singer): MD-Sen: There are a ton of ambitious Democrats who could run to succeed Mikulski. Here's a quick look:
• Rep. Elijah Cummings
• Rep. John Delaney
• Rep. Donna Edwards
• Controller Peter Franchot
• Former Attorney General Doug Gansler
• Rep. Chris Van Hollen
• Del. Heather Mizeur
• Former Gov. Martin O'Malley
• U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez
• Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake
• Rep. John Sarbanes
The bench is a lot smaller on the GOP side, but we have:
• Former Gov. Robert Ehrlich
• Rep. Andy Harris
We can already cross Ben Carson
off the list though.
9:01 AM PT (Jeff Singer): MD-Sen: If Chis Van Hollen did get in, he'd start out with about twice as much cash-on-hand as Elijah Cummings, his nearest competitor. But while fellow Rep. John Delaney doesn't have much in the bank, he can self-fund.
9:11 AM PT (Jeff Singer): San Antonio Mayor: Filing closed Friday for the May 9 non-partisan primary. This race took a while to fully develop, with interim Mayor Ivy Taylor only jumping in a few weeks before the deadline, but there were no surprises on Friday. Taylor will face former state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, former state Rep. Mike Villarreal, and former Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Adkisson.
9:20 AM PT (Jeff Singer): MD-Sen:
US Senate Cash on Hand: CVH 1.7 mil, Cummings 890K, Sarbanes 750K, MoM PAC 579K, Edwards 30K, Delaney 24K #mdpolitics
— @MarylandJuice
10:25 AM PT (Jeff Singer): Chicago Mayor: It hasn't been a kind week for Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Despite massively outspending his rivals in the Feb. 24 non-partisan primary, Rahm only took 45 percent of the vote. To make things worse, the city of Chicago's bond rating was downgraded on Friday.
Rahm did earn the backing of Republican Sen. Mark Kirk on Monday, but Chicago's small bloc of conservative voters were largely behind the incumbent anyway, and Kirk doesn't exactly help the mayor win over disaffected progressives. Rahm did get some better news Monday when Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle announced she wouldn't endorse either candidate, despite rumors that she would support Garcia.
Rahm has been trying to project strength ahead of the April 7 runoff with Cook County Commissioner Jesus "Chuy" Garcia (who took 34 percent on Tuesday), and his allies released a poll on Friday giving him a 50-40 lead. But that survey seemed too good to be true for Team Rahm, and a new numbers from local pollster Ogden & Fry confirm that the mayor is in a bad place. Rahm holds a 43-39 lead over Garcia, with 19 percent undecided.
It's not a good place for an incumbent to be this far below 50 percent in a race against a far-less known opponent, and what's particularly troubling for Rahm is that he's doing worse in this new poll than he did in the first round of voting. However, Rahm is incredibly well-funded and will do everything he can to hit Garcia before his opponent can respond.
11:39 AM PT (David Jarman): Votes: We've compiled a Google Doc showing all the dissenters on the two wild votes from last Friday, where John Boehner couldn't scrape the votes together for a 3-week extension on Homeland Security funding and then had to rely on Democrats to pass a 1-week extension. Nearly one-quarter (62) of the entire Republican caucus voted 'no' on either one or both of the votes. The ones who voted 'no' on both are, for the most part, the House's dystopian caucus, i.e. the couple-dozen members of the new "Freedom Caucus" and their fellow travelers. There are a few odd cases where more establishmentarian types also voted 'no' on both, like Lamar Smith and Randy Forbes, as well as more cases where some voted 'no' on one but not the other.
On the Democratic side, there were 12 members who voted 'aye' on the 3-week vote, mostly moderates and/or swing-district members looking back over their right shoulder. The one 'aye' vote who doesn't really fall into that category is Atlanta-area David Scott, who apparently caught an earful from fellow CBC members during the vote. The really strange list is the five Democrats who kept voting 'no' on the 1-week bill: Raul Grijalva, Grace Napolitano, Pete Visclosky, Bill Pascrell, and Adam Smith. This list seems to have no logic to it at all; it seems to transcend race, region, and even committee membership and ideological position within the Dem caucus.
12:06 PM PT (Jeff Singer): Radio: Jeff Singer was a guest on this Sunday's edition of The Kudzu Vine, discussing Louisiana's 2015 gubernatorial election, Gov. Bobby Jindal's future, and other Bayou State topics. A big thanks as always to hosts David McLaughlin, Tim Shiflett, and Catherine Smith!
12:13 PM PT (Jeff Singer): LA-Gov: Republican Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle recently kicked off his $200,000 ad buy in Acadiana, and we finally have copies of both his spots (here and here). For the most part they're pretty boring, generic introductory stuff. But Angelle briefly speaks French in the final seven seconds of the first ad, a nice way to appeal to a region that has strong French ancestry.
12:21 PM PT (Jeff Singer): MS-AG: On Friday, filing closed for Mississippi's 2015 statewide races. Not much action is expected, with most Republican incumbents, including Gov. Phil Bryant and Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, looking set for easy primary and general election wins. But Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood did attract a credible Republican challenge, with former Assistant U.S. Attorney Mike Hurst jumping in on the final day of qualifying. Hood has always won re-election easily, prevailing 61-39 in 2011 even as Bryant was winning by a similar margin. Still, as the last statewide Democrat in the Deep South, Hood knows better than anyone that he can't take his contest for granted.
12:21 PM PT: IA-03: Poor Staci Appel. The former Democratic state senator turned out to be a pretty good candidate in a challenging district last year, and she also lucked into matching up with a truly lousy opponent in David "A Good Meal" Young, who struggled to unite his party behind him and even got himself triaged by the NRCC at one point. But the twisted winds of 2014 nevertheless blew Young's ragged sloop into port, and he managed a 53-42 victory on Election Day.
So it's not a surprise that Appel now says she's considering a rematch, buoyed by the (very reasonable) belief that turnout in 2016 will be much better than it was in the midterms. Democrats could certainly do worse (hell, unpopular ex-Gov. Chet Culver says he's looking at a bid, too), and considering that Barack Obama actually carried this district 51-47, it's a must-win seat if the party ever hopes to retake the majority in the House.
1:00 PM PT (Jeff Singer): UT-Gov: Republican Gov. Gary Herbert announced a while ago that he'll run again in 2016, but it looks like he'll need to fight for renomination. Jonathan Johnson, the wealthy head of Overstock.com, recently declared that his upcoming gubernatorial campaign is the "[w]orst kept secret in the state." (The gentleman doth flatter himself too much, methinks). While Johnson isn't kicking off his campaign yet, he made it clear that he has "every intention of running."
Johnson touted his business experience, but all he said about Hebert was that he's been there for "two full terms" (which isn't true; Hebert took over for ex-Gov. Jon Huntsman in August of 2009) and that it's time for a new set of eyes. Johnson even called Utah "a well-managed state," and it seems hard to believe that voters will buy his "things are great under Gary Hebert, but fire him and elect me because it can't hurt to have a new guy" argument.
However, the ongoing battle over Utah's nomination system introduces some extra unpredictability to the contest. Until this cycle, each party held a nominating convention before the primary. If someone won at least 60 percent of the delegates' support, he or she won the nomination. If no one pulled this off, the two candidates with the most convention support advanced to the primary. However, a new system known as "Count My Vote" allows candidates to bypass the convention and head directly to the primary ballot. The state GOP has been trying to water down or even completely scrap Count My Vote in the courts and in the legislature, and no one's sure what will happen in the end.
1:18 PM PT (Jeff Singer): NV-???: The headline alone makes this Olivia Nuzzi Daily Beast piece about Sharron Angle's experience at this year's CPAC conference worth a read. But Angle, the 2010 Republican nominee against Sen. Harry Reid, makes a small bit of news here, saying that she'll "probably" run for office again. Angle probably shouldn't expect too much support the next time she's on the ballot: Her 2010 defeat isn't going to inspire many Republicans to help her out.
1:32 PM PT (Jeff Singer): VT-Gov: Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin has a shockingly close call in 2014, defeating his little known Republican foe Scott Milne only 46-45 in a race that was on almost no one's radar even a minute before the polls closed. While a new survey from VTDigger and the Castleton Polling Institute didn't ask any horserace questions, it looks like Shumlin can't expect an easy 2016 win at this stage. The poll (which was conducted over a long 16-day period) finds Shumlin's approval rating slightly underwater at 41-47. That's not irreversible this far out, but it indicates Shumlin still has some work to do if he wants a fourth two-year term.
Shumlin himself has not announced his 2016 plans, but Milne is looking at a rematch. Lt. Gov. Phil Scott has also been named as a potential Republican candidate. While Scott hasn't said much about a campaign, the GOP wants him to run.
1:40 PM PT (David Jarman): Redistricting: Wednesday saw the oral arguments for this year's most momentous Supreme Court case, at least from Daily Kos Elections' narrow perspective: Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission. This case, brought by Arizona Republicans, attempts to undo the voter-passed initiative that created the independent commission that, to their chagrin, created a briefly 5 D-4 R House map. The case turns on whether "legislature" truly means legislature, or all the powers that make laws in a state, but, unsurprisingly, that bit of interpretation seems to come down to political battle lines; Think Progress's Ian Millhiser's prediction, after watching the arguments, is that the decision, as with many others, comes down to how Anthony Kennedy feels about it.
Interestingly, even if the case succeeds, it could still partially blow up in Republicans' faces. If the Republican-controlled legislature is able to re-jigger the Arizona map to gain one or two more House seats, the case would also invalidate California's independent commission, turning the matter over to the Golden State's Democratic-controlled legislature, who could re-map more aggressively and create several more Dem-friendly seats. Unfortunately, it may also be a precedential foot in the door for stopping other voting procedural changes that originated by initiative, such as vote-by-mail in Oregon.
More generally, perhaps you're tired of trying to explain to friends and family why gerrymandering is such an important issue, and getting blank looks in return. Given its complexity, that's not likely to change, but the Washington Post does have a new simple, elegant graphic that shows how powerful a tool it can be, and might be helpful as a visual cue next time you have one of those conversations. It takes a 60/40 constituency, and shows how it can be broken up into a 3-2 delegation, a 5-0 delegation, or a 2-3 delegation, depending on who's doing the drawing. (A more advanced and hands-on, but more time-consuming, demonstration of gerrymandering's power, that you might also recommend to the non-political junkies in your life, is The Redistricting Game, which has been around for a while but I'm glad to see is still available online.)
1:41 PM PT (Jeff Singer): AR-Sen, WATN: Back in December, former Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor didn't rule outchallenging Republican incumbent John Boozman in 2016, an idea that seemed ludicrous given that Pryor was just tossed out of office by an 18-point margin. Well, Pryor has found better things to do with his forced retirement, and he's taking a gig at Venable, a lobbying and law firm. Pryor will join former House members Bart Stupak and Jim Gerlach, both of whom left Congress voluntarily.
3:02 PM PT (Jeff Singer): MD-Sen: There are a ton of candidates who might run here. We have a list of potential Democratic candidates, along with any information about their intentions:
• Prince George’s County Executive Rushern L. Baker, III
• Former Lt. Gov. and 2014 gubernatorial nominee Anthony Brown- considering
• Rep. Elijah Cummings
• Rep. John Delaney- considering
• Rep. Donna Edwards
• State Controller Peter Franchot- unlikely to run
• Former Attorney General and 2014 gubernatorial candidate Doug Gansler
• Rep. Chris Van Hollen- believed to be considering
• Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz
• Former Del. and 2014 gubernatorial candidate Heather Mizeur
• Former Gov. Martin O'Malley- did not rule out a run
• U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez
• Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger- considering
• Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake- did not rule out a run
• Rep. John Sarbanes
On the GOP side:
• Former Secret Service agent, 2012 MD-Sen nominee, and 2014 MD-06 nominee, Dan Bongino- likely to run
• Former Gov. Bob Ehrlich- does not sound interested
• Former Maryland First Lady Kendel Ehrlich
• Rep. Andy Harris- unlikely to run
• Howard County Executive Allan Kittleman
• Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford
• Anne Arundel County Executive Steve Schuh
• Del. Kathy Szeliga
One GOP name we can ditch is physician Ben Carson, who quickly announced he would
focus on a presidential bid instead.
3:06 PM PT (Jeff Singer): MS-01: The Republican field for the May special election grew by one on Monday, with Itawamba County Prosecutor Chip Mills jumping in. Four other Republicans are currently in, with businessman Boyce Adams and Transportation Commissioner Mike Tagert likely to join them.
3:10 PM PT (Jeff Singer): MD-Sen: Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is also reportedly considering.
3:50 PM PT (Jeff Singer): MD-Sen: A visual look at the Democratic field, via dreaminonempty:
A look at the Democratic candidates to replace Mikulski
4:22 PM PT (Jeff Singer): MD-Sen: And here's the GOP: