Campaign Action
Leading Off
● MT-Sen, MT-AL: On Thursday, Donald Trump said he'd nominate GOP Rep. Ryan Zinke, Montana's lone member of the House, to serve as his secretary of the interior. Assuming the appointment goes through, that would set off a special election for Zinke's House seat, and, it would seem, it would also eliminate Zinke as a potential challenger to Democratic Sen. Jon Tester in 2018. Zinke would be one of the GOP's strongest Senate options, so it's no surprise to see that at least one unnamed Republican operative is trying to keep his name alive for the race, but it would be pretty difficult to keep this slot open while Zinke goes and spends at least a year in Washington under Trump's tutelage.
And this being Montana, there are plenty of other Republicans who could run against Tester instead. Politico runs down a whole bunch: state Auditor-elect Matt Rosendale, Secretary of State-elect Corey Stapleton, Attorney General Tim Fox, state Sen. Ed Buttrey, and rich guy Greg Gianforte, who just lost his bid for governor last month. The National Journal adds several more names: state House Speaker Austin Knudsen, Public Service Commissioner Brad Johnson, and state Superintendent of Public Instruction-elect Elsie Arntzen—in other words, basically everyone. And Fox, they say, issued a statement that didn't rule out a bid.
As far as the race to replace Zinke, there's a weird wrinkle. Apparently, under state law, Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock is permitted to make an interim appointment from a list of three names provided by the state GOP, but the secretary of state says that this law runs afoul of the Constitution, which requires special elections to fill House vacancies. That does indeed seem to be the case, though the statute has never been challenged in court—but it almost certainly would be if Bullock attempted to proceed. (Presumably, the Republican Party could also simply refuse to send him a list to choose from.) Bizarrely, the law only passed last year, so it's not like this is some ancient relic everyone forgot about.
Anyhow, once that issue gets cleared out of the way, quite a few Republicans will undoubtedly take a hard look at running for Zinke's seat. Anyone on the roster above could conceivably make a House bid instead of going for the Senate, especially since it would be a much easier lift. Roll Call's Simone Pathé specifically suggests Arntzen and Stapleton, who both lost the GOP primary for this seat to Zinke in 2014, and she also tosses in Rosendale.
And would Democrats try making a play here once again? The national party backed outgoing Superintendent of Public Instruction Denise Juneau earlier this year, and she wound up raising a lot of money but lost her challenge to Zinke by a wide 56-41 margin. That was somewhat better than Hillary Clinton, who lost 56-36, but Gary Johnson took a sizable 6 percent of the vote in Montana, which could explain all the difference. Just before the Zinke news broke, Juneau said she wouldn't rule out another bid, but we haven't heard from her since.
Senate:
● VA-Sen: Investment banker Eric Cantor, who was once, a long time ago, the House GOP's majority leader, will not be making a comeback this cycle. Cantor had been poking his nose back into politics lately, leading to some speculation that he might be interested in challenging Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine this cycle. But Cantor mercifully gave a simple and direct answer to the Washington Post about his intentions, saying, "I'm not running for the 2018 Senate seat." So far, no other Republicans are doing so either.
Gubernatorial:
● CA-Gov: Outgoing Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin is one of the GOP's few decent options for 2018's open gubernatorial race, but she's all but saying nix to a bid. This week, Swearengin said, "I am firmly not planning to run," which is sterner than her formulation last month: "The thought of running for governor is the furthest thing from my mind right now." Still, "not running" and "not planning to run" mean different things in the English language.
With Swearengin looking extremely unlikely, though, the GOP is casting about for an alternative, and Capital Public Radio's Ben Adler says that unnamed Republicans are trying to recruit a real doozy of a candidate: human monster Peter Thiel, the ultra-wealthy Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Trump supporter who, among other things, wants to prolong his life by harvesting blood from young people and injecting it into his body. Billionaire vampire for governor!
● IL-Gov: Democratic state Sen. Andy Manar had reportedly been considering a run against GOP Gov. Bruce Rauner in 2018, and now we have confirmation from Manar himself that he is in fact looking at the race, though he didn't offer a timetable for making a decision. A ton of other Democrats are also in the mix, but so far, no one has actually entered the contest.
House:
● CA-34: Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez, the only elected official currently running to succeed state Attorney General-designate Xavier Becerra, just added a few more notable endorsements to his list. Gomez now has the support of three Democratic members of Congress from Southern California: Reps. Grace Napolitano, Pete Aguilar, and Juan Vargas, who join Sen.-elect Kamala Harris in his corner. Several other members of the Democratic establishment, including the leaders of both the state Senate and Assembly, are also backing Gomez, who so far faces three other Democrats in the expected special election for this dark-blue seat in downtown Los Angeles.
● GA-06: As soon as her husband, GOP Rep. Tom Price, was named as Donald Trump's choice for Chief of Destroying Obamacare (aka Health and Human Services Secretary) last month, state Rep. Betty Price saw her name floated as a possible option to succeed him in next year's expected special election. Only now is she actually speaking out publicly, though she's not really saying much, claiming it's "premature" to discuss any decisions until Gov. Nathan Deal sets a date for candidates to qualify for the ballot.
However, when you predicate an announcement based on the scheduling of an event that will, in fact, inevitably be scheduled, that sounds like an insincere dodge. What could Price possibly learn based on Deal's choice of a filing deadline? What may be going on here are some behind-the-scenes negotiations or perhaps a game of chicken, since an earlier report suggested that Price seemed "unlikely" to run if former Secretary of State Karen Handel jumped into the race. We'll know soon enough.
Meanwhile, Democrats have a new contender of their own, former state Rep. Sally Harrell, who left office in 2005. Importantly, she has the support of state Rep. Scott Holcomb, who was a top choice for Team Blue before declining a bid earlier this month. The problem, though, is that two other Democrats are also running, former state Sen. Ron Slotin and little-known attorney Josh McLaurin. All candidates from all parties run together on a single ballot, and there's a runoff in the likely event that no one takes a majority. But if Democrats split the vote, then two Republicans could advance.
That would be a tragedy, because as we've noted repeatedly, Donald Trump only won this conservative district by a 48-47 margin, even though Mitt Romney had carried it 61-38 four years earlier. That potentially gives Democrats an opening, but if they can't clear the field for Harrell, then they could fumble the opportunity entirely.
● NM-01: With Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham recently announcing a bid for governor, plenty of her fellow Democrats will be eager to try to succeed her in the House, seeing as Hillary Clinton comfortably won New Mexico's 1st District by a 52-36 margin. NM Political Report's Andy Lyman spoke with eight different Democrats whose interest levels range from "thinking about it" to "not ruling it out." Four of those have said they're actively considering:
● State Sen. Jacob Candelaria;
● State Rep. Javier Martinez;
● Albuquerque City Councilor Pat Davis; and
● Bernalillo County Commissioner Maggie Hart Stebbins.
The Albuquerque Journal, which also lists all of these potential candidates, adds in Albuquerque City Councilor Ken Sanchez, though they don't have a quote from him. NM Political Report has much more detail on the potential Democratic field.
A few Republicans are looking at the race, too. The most prominent is Lt. Gov. John Sanchez, who is also a possible gubernatorial candidate; in a statement, Sanchez said he's gotten "encouragement" to run, which we believe. Another possibility is Albuquerque Mayor Richard Berry, who, like Sanchez, could run for governor as well. Berry's team would only say, though, that he's "finishing the job he was elected to do" and would "address next steps once the time is right," whenever that might be.
Grab Bag:
● North Carolina: Last month, Democrat Roy Cooper unseated Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, while Democrats also gained a majority on the state Supreme Court, breaking the Republican stranglehold on North Carolina's state government. Now, though, Republicans have used the pretext of a lame-duck special legislative session—ostensibly convened for disaster relief—to introduce a slew of measures that radically curtail the authority of the governor and even the high court itself. This nakedly partisan plot is unprecedented in modern state history. Indeed, you have to go back to the 1890s to find a parallel, when reactionaries violently introduced Jim Crow after a multiracial coalition of progressives briefly won power.
The scope of the GOP's war on democracy is stunning. Republican proposals would remove the governor's party's control over all the state and county boards of election. They would require state Senate approval for the governor's cabinet appointees. One bill would slash the governor's number of executive branch appointees from 1,500 to 300. Another eliminates the governor's ability to appoint members of the state board of education and the University of North Carolina. One more measure would make state Supreme Court races partisan and require state constitutional challenges to first go before the Republican-dominated state Court of Appeals. Republicans might still even outright pack the Supreme Court to regain their majority.
Legislative Republicans under Gov. Pat McCrory had already put North Carolina on the front lines of the battle against voting rights. Almost immediately after the Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, McCrory signed America's most sweeping voter suppression law in half a century, which included a strict voter ID requirement, the end of same-day registration, and cutbacks to early voting opportunities. Republicans literally ordered data on which voting methods black voters used more and eliminated them. This law was so extreme that a federal court said it "targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision" when it struck it down in July.
Republicans had previously gerrymandered the legislature so aggressively that they won veto-proof majorities in 2012 despite losing the popular vote, and they easily maintained them in 2016 despite McCrory's loss. A court in 2016 struck down those maps as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, meaning that North Carolina Republicans are using an illegally obtained legislative majority to usurp the powers of the fairly elected new Democratic governor. Democracy relies on electoral losers recognizing the legitimacy of the victor, and this breathtaking power-grab can only be described as a full-blown legislative coup d'état designed to subvert electoral democracy itself.
● Pres-by-CD: We journey to Colorado for our project to calculate the presidential election results by congressional district. We have a chart of all 435 congressional districts here, which also includes results from 2012. That's the page you'll want to bookmark, since we're updating it continuously. We'll be pushing out new data on a rolling basis as the final results are officially certified and the precinct-level election results we need for our calculations become available.
Hillary Clinton carried the Centennial State 48-43, a margin similar to Barack Obama's 51-46 win in 2012. Clinton carried the same four congressional districts that Obama won four years ago, while Donald Trump won the same three seats that Mitt Romney took. However, there were a few notable shifts below the surface.
The 6th District, a suburban Denver seat that includes parts of Aurora and Centennial, swung from 52-47 Obama to 50-41 Clinton. However, that didn't stop Republican Rep. Mike Coffman from beating Democrat Morgan Carroll by a wide 51-43 margin in one of the most expensive races in the country. Democrats also targeted Republican Rep. Scott Tipton in the 3rd District, a seat that includes Grand Junction and Pueblo in western Colorado. However, Trump won the 3rd 52-40, a big increase from Romney's 52-46 victory, and Tipton prevailed by an even larger 55-40.
Colorado's other five seats look safe for the party that holds them. Clinton carried the suburban Denver 7th District 51-39, a drop from Obama's 56-41 but still not especially close. Democratic Rep. Ed Perlmutter has been mentioned as a possible 2018 gubernatorial candidate, and his seat is blue enough that Democrats should be favored if they have to defend it. Clinton won the Boulder-based 2nd District 56-35, and Denver's 1st District 69-23. On the other side, Trump took the 4th in eastern Colorado 57-34, and Colorado Springs' 5th 57-33.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, and Stephen Wolf, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, and James Lambert.