Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet (D)
Leading Off:
• CO-Sen: On Friday, Democratic incumbent Michael Bennet announced that he would support the Obama administration's nuclear agreement with Iran. Republican rich guy Robert Blaha recently said that he would definitely run against Bennet if he backed the deal, and he seems to be committed to this course of action, telling Roll Call's Simone Pathé that he's likely to enter in the next few days. Meanwhile, conservative state Sen. Tim Neville has confirmed he's looking at running as well and hopes to decide by mid-October.
National Republicans aren't particularly interested in either man, though; instead, they've been trying to recruit prosecutor George Brauchler. However, Blaha's expected move isn't necessarily bad for the NRSC. If he and Neville both get in, they could split whatever anti-establishment vote there is enough to help the establishment's preferred choice. Blaha's only run for office once, spending $770,000 of his own money only to lose 62 to 39 to incumbent Rep. Doug Lamborn in the 2012 GOP primary for Colorado's 5th Congressional District.
Gubernatorial:
• KY-Gov: Democrat Jack Conway has mostly had the airwaves to himself for the last few weeks, with wealthy Republican Matt Bevin surprisingly unwilling to self-fund the money he needs to run ads. Conway's making the most of his advantage with a new minute-long spot that's unsubtly titled "Liar."
The narrator in Conway's commercial contrasts clips of Bevin saying, among other things, that he opposes the farm bill and doesn't support rural childhood education, before showing footage of Bevin taking the opposite stances. The ad also features an obligatory shot at Bevin's taxes: Bevin say he has "no tax delinquency problem," then a news anchor talks about Bevin's late taxes. The ad is running statewide and the Courier-Journal says the Conway campaign is spending at least $97,000 on it across several markets, though the size of the buy may be larger.
• WV-Gov: West Virginia's not a state that gets polled often, but now we have our third survey out of the Mountain State in recent weeks, this time from Repass Research on behalf of MetroNews. In the Democratic primary, Repass finds coal billionaire Jim Justice with a 40-34 lead on state Senate Minority Leader Jeff Kessler, a bit wider than the 28-26 Justice edge that Kessler's own internal showed.
Repass also has Justice up by a large 46-37 margin over state Senate President Bill Cole, the likely Republican nominee. There's a good reason to be skeptical of that spread, though, since a Democratic poll that was probably paid for by Justice only had him up 36-30. If internal data, which presumably is going to be on the rosier side, has Justice ahead by 6, then how likely is it that he's actually up 9?
There's another reason to wonder about Repass' numbers, too: They have Cole beating Kessler 44-35, which would mean there's an 18-point electability spread between the two Democratic hopefuls. It's certainly possible that Justice, as a businessman without a voting record, is better-liked than Kessler, who's been in office almost two decades (and as a Democrat in a state increasingly hostile to the party). But it's hard to explain a gap of this magnitude between two candidates, without one guy being a totally scandal-plagued pariah. So it's hard to know where things really stand, and as the ballgame announcers say, there's still a lot of baseball left to play.
House:
• IN-09: A little while ago, Jim Pfaff, a former conservative radio host in Colorado and ex-chief of staff to Kansas Rep. Tim Huelskamp, filed paperwork with the FEC, and he recently announced that he would run in Indiana's heavily Republican 9th District—which, of course, is in neither Colorado nor Kansas. Weirdly, Pfaff was auditioning for another talk radio gig—back in Colorado—as recently as July of this year. Pfaff did get his start in Indiana politics so maybe he still has some local allies, but he's going to need a lot to go right.
Pfaff will face state Sens. Erin Houchin and Brent Waltz and state Attorney General Greg Zoeller in the GOP primary for Rep. Todd Young's open seat. The Democrats are fielding Shelli Yoder, who lost 55 to 45 to Young here in 2012 before being appointed to the Monroe County Council soon afterward.
• MN-02: Now that Republican Rep. John Kline is retiring from this swingy suburban Twin Cities seat, plenty of Republicans are mulling bids here. Ex-state Sen. Ted Daley is the latest to confirm that he's interested. Daley was unseated in 2012 after one term in the legislature, and his 53 to 47 defeat wasn't much different than Romney's 53 to 45 loss in his state Senate seat. David Gerson, a gadfly who ran against Kline in the 2012 and 2014 primaries, also kicked off another bid on Friday, but he's unlikely to be much of a factor.
On the Democratic side, state Rep. Rick Hansen has left the door open to a bid. Former health care executive Angie Craig and physician Mary Lawrence were already running before Kline announced his departure, and state Rep. Joe Atkins expects to decide soon.
• NV-04: Despite Harry Reid's endorsement of state Sen. Ruben Kihuen in Nevada's 4th District, the other three candidates in the Democratic primary have said they aren't going anywhere. Columnist Steve Sebelius suggests this partly has to do with Reid's lame-duck status: Since he's retiring at the end of the next year, his once-mighty political operation is no longer quite so feared. That's too bad, though, since Democrats still lack a candidate in the swingy 3rd District, which is an open seat. (The 4th, which is bluer, is represented by GOP Rep. Cresent Hardy.)
Other Races:
• Jefferson County, CO: Conservative school board members in Jefferson County, a large suburb west of Denver home to one-tenth of Colorado's residents, will face a November recall election over proposed changes to the AP U.S. history curriculum. After obtaining a majority in 2014, conservatives tried to institute a radically revisionist version of American history that emphasizes all the things conservatives tend to love, like patriotism and the free market, while demonizing civil disobedience and, by extension, the civil rights movement. Those plans have since been dropped, but along with the board's other recent actions, they've caused an outcry from teachers, students, and parents upset by such a nakedly political agenda.
While school board recalls would normally be of little importance to national politics, Jefferson County is yet another example of the Koch brothers' national political network seeking to promote right-wing interests down to the local level. The Kochs are already planning to support the embattled conservative board members via their main front group, Americans for Prosperity, turning Jefferson County into an important battleground in the fight over propaganda in public education.
• Nashville, TN Mayor: On behalf of The Tennessean, PPP gives us our first (and perhaps only) independent poll of the non-partisan but very nasty Sept. 10 runoff between conservative David Fox and progressive Megan Barry. PPP finds Barry with a narrow 46-45 lead but points out that the undecideds are mostly Democrats and African Americans, groups that should both come in strongly for Barry. However, in an off-year election like this, there's no telling if they'll turn out in the numbers she needs.
The poll was in the field Aug. 31 and Sept. 1, around the time Fox unleashed an ugly radio spot depicting Barry as an anti-Christian extremist. This story has dominated the last few days, but if it's having an effect on the race one way or another, this survey was in the field too early to capture it. Regardless, if PPP's numbers are right, Thursday's contest will be one to watch.
• New York, NY Mayor: Bill de Blasio surfed into the New York City mayor's office in 2013 atop a huge wave of progressive support, but two years on, that enthusiasm has vanished, leaving him with few friends and plenty of critics. Despite coming into office as a heralded campaign operative, de Blasio's political instincts have proven disastrous: He's picked repeated fights with Gov. Andrew Cuomo and lost every single one of them. Now, Cuomo's a reactionary a-hole who's has tried to thwart nearly all of de Blasio's liberal priorities, but it still adds up to a mayoralty marked mostly by its failings.
And that has a lot of New York Democrats talking about possible replacements for de Blasio come 2017. The biggest names are city Comptroller Scott Stringer, who bowed out of the mayor's race last time, and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who's in his second term representing part of Brooklyn. Jeffries is suddenly receiving a bunch of attention, thanks to a new New York Times profile that features the Democrats' 2009 nominee for mayor, Bill Thompson, touting Jeffries as the "strongest black candidate" who could challenge de Blasio.
Jeffries is to de Blasio's right on the issue of charter schools (Jeffries is a big supporter, as are many wealthy hedge fund-types), but he's also criticized him from the left on police reforms. Jeffries also, says the Times, has a good relationship with Cuomo, though whether that would actually prove beneficial for the city or would just mean Jeffries would meekly accept whatever Cuomo decrees is an open question.
Jeffries himself isn't ruling out a bid, saying that de Blasio "should not get a free pass," but he's got a lot of time to make up his mind. He also wouldn't have to give up his seat in Congress to run, but even one-on-one, he'd still have a hard time knocking off an incumbent. For instance, would Jeffries be able to count on widespread support from African-American voters? Or would he wind up like Thompson, a black candidate who, thanks to his centrism, wound up ceding half of the black vote to de Blasio when he ran a second time in 2013?
And a multi-way race would be even harder to handicap, especially since there are several other potential Democratic options out there. One is City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who also isn't saying no to a bid. That alone is interesting because MMV, as she's often known, is generally regarded as a de Blasio ally. However, she's also talking about possibly running for governor of Puerto Rico, so who knows what she might do. (That post is next up in 2016.)
In addition, the Times mentions three more alternatives for the Democrats: Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, and Public Advocate Letitia James. If multiple candidates get in, perhaps de Blasio could get saved by the proverbial clown car. But given how weak the incumbent is, at least one serious challenger is all but certain to run. As Jeffries says, de Blasio won't get a free pass.
• VA State Senate: This November, Democrats are hoping to net the one seat they'll need to retake the Virginia state Senate, but the GOP has a few pickup opportunities of their own. One of the most expensive contests in the state is in the open 29th District in Northern Virginia. While Obama carried this seat 63.5 to 35.2 and it easily voted for both Terry McAuliffe and Mark Warner in their tight 2013 and 2014 statewide campaigns, Team Blue is worried that turnout will plunge in an off-year like this, especially one without any bigger races at the top of the ticket. The GOP also has a very formidable candidate in in Manassas Mayor Hal Parrish, and he has a huge cash-on-hand lead over Democrat Jeremy McPike.
Thanks to his fundraising, Parrish has been able to go up on TV, and he's already out with his second spot of the campaign, a positive ad that promotes him as a mayor who gets the job done. McPike's team says that they have produced their own TV ad, but aren't saying when they'll release it. Television time is very expensive in the D.C. media market, and if Parrish has the airwaves to himself for a while, that's not good news for McPike.
Grab Bag:
• Demographics: Pew Research has released a remarkably thorough look at American Catholics, in anticipation of the papal visit to the U.S. later this month. Similar to their recent work on Orthodox Jews, they approach Catholicism as a wide spectrum of beliefs and intensities, rather than one uniform religion, as many media pundits often do.
How often, for instance, do you hear speculation about which candidate is winning "the Catholic vote?" It's a group that encompasses perhaps one-third of the nation, and runs the gamut from not just liberal to conservative, but also from fervently devoted to largely indifferent about faith. In the end, it's not much different from referring to the "female vote" or the "white vote," sadly, both of which are constantly discussed as though they're monolithic blobs as well.
Pew's study focuses on social issues (abortion, birth control, same-sex marriage, and even divorce and cohabitation), without delving into issues like party identification, or even much about economic issues beyond "working to help the poor" and the Church's newfound interest in climate change. It'd be nice to see them expand more on partisan politics, but what's strong about this study is that it looks at active Catholics (20 percent of the population) who attend mass regularly and those who don't, and even looks at gradations like "cultural Catholics," ex-Catholics, and those with other connections to Catholicism (who, taken together, add up to nearly 45 percent of the country's population).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's a wide gap in opinions on issues like divorce, cohabitation, and birth control between those who attend regularly and those who don't. But even when considering all Catholics together, there's a majority allowing tolerance for those acts—and many Catholics have partaken in those particular forbidden fruits themselves: one in four have divorced, 44 percent have cohabited. In a just world, this study would help reduce repetition of the notion of the "Catholic vote" as lazy shorthand for a uniformly conservative bloc, especially as Catholicism in America continues to rapidly shift from something that's uniformly "white ethnic" to something that includes tens of millions of Hispanics.
• FL Redistricting: Last month, the Florida legislature's special session on redistricting ended in failure as the state House and state Senate each passed their own congressional maps and refused to reach any kind of compromise, despite the fact that both chambers are controlled by Republicans. Now the state Supreme Court has ordered Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis to conduct a hearing on the various remedial plans proposed by the parties, "especially focusing" on the two separate maps the legislature came up with. Lewis must then "make a recommendation" as to which map (or portions of maps) "best fulfills" the mandates set out in high court's July order striking down the current lines.
Plaintiffs probably have reason to be miffed about this "especially focusing" business, which is a vague term that has no real legal significance. (One dissenting Supreme Court judge derided his brethren for "attempting to micromanage the trial court.") If it leads to Lewis giving greater weight to the legislature's maps (which differed only minimally from one another) rather than the plaintiffs', that would likely redound to the GOP's advantage. But whatever map Lewis recommends will still be subject to the Supreme Court's review, and it still has to pass constitutional muster.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir and Jeff Singer, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, and Stephen Wolf.