Senate:
● CO-Sen: A few days ago, the DSCC announced that they had canceled their entire $5 million ad reservation for Colorado's Senate race, and it's not hard to see why. While Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet began this cycle looking vulnerable, he's sure not endangered anymore. Several potentially strong Republican candidates decided not to run, and Team Red ended up nominating underfunded El Paso County Commissioner Darryl Glenn. The NRSC has done essentially nothing to help Glenn, and polls consistently show Bennet far ahead.
The DSCC was the only major outside group we are aware of that had booked any fall TV time for this race, and between Donald Trump's weaknesses in Colorado, Glenn's problems, and Bennet's huge warchest, it seems unlikely that anyone else will bother to spend much cash here on either side. Daily Kos Elections is moving this race from Likely to Safe Democratic.
● LA-Sen: On behalf of Democrats for Education Reform, a group that advocates for charter schools and against teachers unions, the Democratic pollster Anzalone Liszt Grove Research takes a look at the November jungle primary for Louisiana's open Senate seat. The state branch of DFER is backing Democratic attorney Caroline Fayard, and the poll finds her doing relatively well:
State Treasurer John Kennedy (R): 18
Attorney Caroline Fayard (D): 13
Rep. Charles Boustany (R): 13
Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell (D): 7
Rep. John Fleming (R): 6
2014 Senate candidate Rob Maness (R): 4
Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke (R): 3
Other: 4
In the very likely event that no one takes a majority of the vote in November, the top two candidates will advance to a December runoff. The only other poll we've seen in months was a Remington Research survey for a conservative blog that showed John Kennedy far ahead with 27, and Campbell, Boustany, and Fayard locked in a tight race for the other runoff spot. Both polls agree that John Fleming is far behind, and that David Duke has little support.
The ALG memo says that, when "brief biographical information about each candidate" was read to respondents, Kennedy and Fayard both tied with 20, with Boustany at 17 and Campbell all the way back at 8. (The descriptions of each candidate are available here). LAPolitics posted the full poll, which also tested Fayard against three different Republicans in hypothetical runoffs:
64-15 vs. David Duke
38-49 vs. John Kennedy
43-40 vs. Charles Boustany
While Fayard's numbers against Boustany look promising, it's tough for Democrats to win federal races in states this red. It's also worth noting that ALG has Donald Trump defeating Hillary Clinton just 46-40, which is a whole lot smaller than Romney's 58-41 win, so it's possible these December matchups are too optimistic for Team Blue.
● OH-Sen: Things just went from bad to worse to way, way worse for Democrat Ted Strickland. Following a week's worth of escalating cancellations of multi-million dollar ad buys from allied groups, the Columbus Dispatch reported that DSCC executive director Tom Lopach privately told attendees at a trade association gathering that Strickland could only prevail "if a wave comes in." When asked what went wrong in Ohio, Lopach reportedly went on to say, "[Republican Sen. Rob] Portman has run a damn fine race," and added, "The rest, I'll have to tell you over a drink."
The DSCC offered a weak non-denial, objecting only to the "characterization of the meeting," but the committee's on-the-record comments were even worse. Montana Sen. Jon Tester, the chair of the DSCC, trotted out the very pillar of the loserspeak canon in comments to Politico on Friday:
"The real poll comes in November. That's when it counts."
Goodnight, nurse! If all the rest of these polls—which have Strickland trailing Portman by an average margin of 46-39—aren't "real," then why have Democrats cut back on $6.7 million in Ohio advertising since Aug. 30? Whether by word or deed, the DSCC's vote of no-confidence has been cast.
Unfortunately, the news gets no better from there. Also on Friday, unnamed media buyers told The Hill that Strickland himself has now cut back on his own advertising. The exact size of this latest cancellation isn't known, but according to the report, Strickland had reserved $500,000 in the four affected media markets (Cincinnati, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown) over the next two weeks.
Strickland's campaign characterized the move as a routine shift of resources and says the total amount it plans to spend hasn't changed. But last week, in response to initial reports that the DSCC was pulling back on $500,000 in air support, Strickland's team claimed that that, too, was merely a re-allocation and not a withdrawal. That turned out not to be the case, since the committee wound up yanking another $1.5 million just days later. Perhaps this latest maneuver is just a reshuffling, but it may also be that Strickland, whose fundraising has been weak from the start, simply doesn't have enough money left to implement his full paid media plan.
As progressives who've always liked Strickland's populist message, we're deeply disappointed. Strickland ran a damn fine campaign in 2010, losing his gubernatorial re-election bid by just 2 percent in what was a brutal year for Team Blue. But whatever magic allowed him to keep it close six years ago appears long gone now. As we've noted in the past, Republicans have spent months running commercials arguing that Strickland devastated Ohio's economy during his governorship, with very little pushback from Democrats.
Portman himself has also run plenty of positive ads. Most notably, several of his spots take credit for his work on a bill to combat opioid addiction, often featuring emotional testimony from people who lost loved ones thanking their senator. The anti-Strickland ads naturally don't mention that Strickland was governor during the Great Recession, nor did Portman's ads note that his anti-opioid legislation lacked the funding to pay for the programs it authorizes. But it was on Democrats to point these things out, and since they didn't do so effectively, the GOP's strategy worked very well—perhaps better than Republicans had good reason to expect.
The DSCC's Lopach is right: A wave could still topple Portman. But without one brewing on the horizon, we're moving this race from Lean Republican to Likely Republican.
● Polls: Quinnipiac takes a look at four Senate battlegrounds, and the news overall is not great for Team Blue:
● FL-Sen: Marco Rubio (R-inc): 50, Patrick Murphy (D): 43 (43-43 presidential) (Aug: 48-45 Rubio)
● NC-Sen: Richard Burr (R-inc): 49, Deborah Ross (D): 43 (42-38 Clinton)
● OH-Sen: Rob Portman (R-inc): 51, Ted Strickland (D): 40 (41-37 Trump) (Aug: 49-40 Portman)
● PA-Sen: Pat Toomey (R-inc): 46, Katie McGinty (D): 45 (44-39 Clinton) (Aug: 47-44 McGinty)
The polls were taken over a long 10-day period. As we've noted before, Quinnipiac has a very bad habit of keeping their surveys in the field for too long. As the well-known maxim has it, a poll is a snapshot in time, and as with a camera, the longer your exposure, the blurrier your image gets.
However, while all of these Senate polls are a little more conservative than the HuffPost Pollster averages, none of them are unreasonable. In Florida, the average gives Rubio a 47-41 edge, while in Pennsylvania, McGinty has an average 43-42 lead, close to what Quinnipiac found. In North Carolina, Burr averages a smaller 43-40 edge, and it also seems unlikely that he'll run 10 points ahead of Donald Trump. In Ohio, Portman "only" has an average lead of 46-39, but given how bad Strickland's prospects look there, it's hard to hold this against Quinnipiac.
Gubernatorial:
● NC-Gov: In an otherwise meh release for Democrats from Quinnipiac, they give Team Blue one piece of good news in North Carolina. Democrat Roy Cooper leads Republican Gov. Pat McCrory 51-44; the same sample has Hillary Clinton up 42-38. The HuffPost Pollster average gives Cooper a 48-44 edge.
Grab Bag:
● Demographics: Pew Research is out with a comprehensive look at the U.S.'s Hispanic population, which is still growing rapidly. However, the data point that may get the most attention here is that the growth rate among the Hispanic population has slowed down, to the extent that they're no longer the nation's fastest growing minority group. Asians have moved into that slot, growing at a 3.4 percent rate in the 2007-2014 period. The Hispanic population grew at a 2.8 percent rate during that same period, down from the 4.4 percent rate in the 2000-2007 timeframe.
You may already be familiar with the main cause of the slowdown, even though it's rarely reported and directly contradicts Republican scaremongering. Immigration from Mexico has, since 2009, reversed thanks to the recession but never changed back again, so there's still more movement to Mexico. The growth in the population instead is coming primarily from birth rates, but birth rates have also fallen noticeably since the 00s, down from a 98.3 births per 1,000 women ages 15-44 rate in 2009 to a 72.1 percent rate in 2014.
While the highest percentages of Hispanics are still found in the border states (New Mexico, followed by California and Texas), the highest percentages of Hispanic growth are in the South and to a lesser extent, the Midwest. (That's based on, of course, that they're starting from a much lower baseline.) At the county level, the highest levels of growth were disproportionately in North Dakota, consistent with that state's broad-based oil-driven economic boom in the early part of this decade.
Pew also has a sidebar focusing specifically on the metropolitan areas with the largest Hispanic populations, looking at rates of how many were foreign-born and how many are under 18 in each metro. Perhaps most interestingly, they also look at mix of different ancestries (mostly Mexican in most places, especially the southwest, but predominantly Puerto Rican in the northeast and central Florida, Cuban in the Miami area, and Salvadoran in the Washington DC area).
Ad Roundup:
● NH-Sen: The NRSC argues that under Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan, college tuition has spiked.
● NV-Sen: While Democrats have run some Spanish ads tying Republican Joe Heck to Donald Trump, this is the first time that Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto is doing it in an English-language spot. The commercial starts with clips of GOP Gov. Brian Sandoval and Sen. Dean Heller saying that they're not backing Trump. A recent clip is then played where a reporter asks Heck if he's "completely supporting" Trump, and Heck responding, "I am." Heck is then asked if he trusts Trump "having his finger on the nuclear button?" and Heck replies, "I do."
Like a recent Ted Strickland ad in Ohio, this commercial doesn't actually feature any clips of Trump saying anything offensive or reckless, which is a problem. It's a good idea to establish right off the bat why Trump is so unacceptable and why it's problematic that Heck supports him, rather than just trusting the audience to already hate Trump enough to make the association themselves. It doesn't help that the (admittedly few) polls we have of Nevada show Trump locked in a tight race with Hillary Clinton, so it doesn't seem like enough voters instinctively want to reject Trump and anyone who stands with him.
Meanwhile, the DSCC continues to attack Heck for voting to defund Planned Parenthood. Heck argues that, as a veteran, he's someone voters can trust.
● PA-Sen: Republican Sen. Pat Toomey argues that while he fights corporate welfare, Democrat Katie McGinty got rich off the corporate system. Senate Majority PAC features a clip of Toomey praising a trade agreement.
● MO-Gov: Chris Koster reminds voters that he's the rare Democrat who has the backing of the Missouri Farm Bureau, with the narrator describing him as "a fiscal conservative with an A-rating from the NRA."
● CO-06: Republican Rep. Mike Coffman argues that Democrat Morgan Carroll helped sleazy clients in the legislature whom she also worked for as a personal injury lawyer.
● ME-02: House Majority PAC once again portrays Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin as a Wall Street ally who is out of step with Maine.
● MI-07: This is one of the dumbest, lamest attack ads we've seen in quite some time. GOP Rep. Tim Walberg tries to call Democrat Gretchen Driskell a liar because supposedly falsely claimed she was a real estate "broker." What makes this is stupid is that Driskell is indeed licensed as a real estate "salesperson," and the terms are interchangeable according to industry professionals. Says the CEO of the Michigan Commercial Board of Realtors, "This the most ridiculous thing in the world. Her job is to broker." Yep.
● NE-02: The NRCC argues Democratic Rep. Brad Ashford voted against military funding and voted to stop airstrikes on ISIS. The Credit Union Legislative Action Council (aka CULAC) praises Ashford for being a bipartisan leader. The size of CULAC's buy is $250,000.
● VA-05: In her first spot, Democrat Jane Dittmar talks about her business background and creating jobs.
● VA-10: Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock is up with her first spot, where her daughter argues that Comstock works hard for her constituents. Politico reports that the size of the buy is $100,000.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir and Jeff Singer, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, and Stephen Wolf.