The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
Leading Off
● VA-Gov: On Tuesday, three pollsters released their latest results in Virginia's November gubernatorial race. First, Roanoke College has Democrat Ralph Northam leading Republican Ed Gillespie by 50-44, which is relatively similar to his 47-43 lead in their mid-September poll. Next, Christopher Newport University's release finds Northam up 48-44, which is a modest drop from his 49-42 edge in their early October survey. However, Monmouth gives Gillespie a 48-47 advantage, making them the very first pollster since the June primaries to find Gillespie leading at all. Monmouth's late September poll had Northam ahead 49-44, meaning they found the race swinging noticeably to the right.
Campaign Action
In the aggregate, these three polls should make Northam feel better about his chances than Gillespie. However, these numbers demonstrate that this race is still far from over with three weeks left to go. While Northam has almost always led by modest margins since the general election began, it wouldn't take anything more than a typical polling misfire for Gillespie to come out ahead.
Still, money is one thing that Northam won't be lacking for in the final three weeks. He crushed Gillespie in September fundraising, bringing in $7.2 million compared to just $4.4 million for the Republican. Furthermore, only $1 million of Northam's haul came from the DGA's PAC, while a full $2 million of Gillespie's total came from the RGA and its aligned PAC, meaning Northam's army of small donors may be more likely to give again. Northam started October with a hefty $5.7 million on-hand, while Gillespie began the month with only $2.5 million in the bank. Republicans have been heavily running ads in recent weeks, but they likely won't be able to dominate the airwaves for the remainder of the race without assistance from outside groups.
3Q 2017 Fundraising
You can find our third-quarter Senate fundraising chart right here, and our companion House chart will be coming shortly!
● CT-Sen: Chris Murphy (D-inc): $1.3 million raised, $6 million cash-on-hand
● NV-Sen: Danny Tarkanian (R): $307,000 raised, $270,000 cash-on-hand
● OH-Sen: Josh Mandel (R): $1 million raised, $4.1 million cash-on-hand
● RI-Sen: Sheldon Whitehouse (D-inc): $584,000 rasied, $2.6 million cash-on-hand
Senate
● AL-Sen: Democrat Doug Jones' latest ad does its best to burnish his bipartisan credentials while making no mention of his party label in this conservative state. It starts by asking if viewers have "had enough of career politicians." Jones then promises to "work across party lines to create jobs," increase wages, fix health care, and improve education. He argues he can "work with Republicans better than [Republican] Roy Moore can work with anyone."
Gubernatorial
● ME-Gov: On Tuesday, state Senate President Mike Thibodeau became the latest Republican to join the increasingly crowded primary to succeed term-limited GOP Gov. Paul LePage. Thibodeau faces term limits himself next year, so this race is a free shot for him. He has served as Senate president since the GOP regained a majority in 2014, but he nearly lost hard-fought races that year and in 2016 for his own seat, which is located south of Bangor and favored Hillary Clinton by 46.3-45.7.
Thibodeau, curiously enough, completes the trifecta of the GOP's top three state legislative leaders all running for governor, since state Senate Majority Leader Garrett Mason and state House Minority Leader Ken Fredette had both joined the race during the last several weeks. They will also face former state health commissioner Mary Mayhew, but this field could easily swell further after Republican Sen. Susan Collins recently announced she wouldn't run.
Indeed, one of those candidates could be businessman Shawn Moody. Moody ran as a centrist independent in 2010 and took 5 percent, helping to deprive left-leaning independent Eliot Cutler of victory that year against hard-right Republican Gov. Paul LePage by playing spoiler. However, Moody recently joined the GOP and says "there's a high probability" that he may run again in 2018. Moody could face tough odds in the closed Republican primary, but his joining the party at least means he won't be able to play spoiler for either side as an independent next year.
● MI-Gov: On behalf of the local Michigan political tipsheet MIRS News Service, Mitchell Research released a late-September poll of next year's Republican primary for the open gubernatorial contest. Mitchell finds state Attorney General Bill Schuette crushing Lt. Gov. Brian Calley by 52-13 in a two-way race.
Schuette has a large name recognition advantage that could be driving his lead, with 84 percent familiar with him compared to just 45 percent familiar with Calley. However, Donald Trump's recent endorsement of Schuette may have also buoyed his support. Unlike Schuette, Calley has yet to officially join the race, and it's possible that polls like this could give him second thoughts about doing so.
● NJ-Gov: Fairleigh Dickinson University is the latest pollster to find Democrat Phil Murphy with a commanding lead over Republican Kim Guadagno, with their newest survey placing Murphy ahead by 47-32. FDU hasn't released a poll since the June primaries, but these numbers are well in line with what other outfits have found. One factor hampering Guadagno is outgoing GOP Gov. Chris Christie's atrociously bad 16 percent approval rating, with 77 percent disapproving.
Indeed, Christie's tenure has provided Democrats with ample fodder for attack ads against Guadagno. Murphy's latest spot brings the hammer down by blasting Christie and Guadagno over the 2013 Bridgegate scandal. He speaks to the camera amid shots of the George Washington Bridge, which connects New Jersey to New York City, and lambasts the Christie administration for making a politically motivated traffic jam its biggest triumph while the economy has failed the middle class.
● RI-Gov: Lt. Gov. Dan McKee, a Democrat, recently revealed that he "will announce plans for his political future" on Nov. 7. WPRI reports that there is buzz among state politics observers that McKee might primary Democratic Gov. Gina Raimondo next year, although McKee's spokesperson declined to comment when asked. Raimondo has had a number of struggles throughout her first term, but she is also a formidable fundraiser.
McKee may not be ideally positioned to challenge the incumbent if he runs, though, since he is a well-known proponent of charter schools. McKee is also likely to draw a more progressive primary challenger of his own if he runs for re-election, which could prompt him to roll the dice on the top office instead, even if it's still an uphill battle.
House
● CA-36: Democratic Rep. Raul Ruiz looks pretty safe for re-election: Not only did California's 36th District move several points to the left, from 51-48 Obama to 52-43 Clinton, but Ruiz also ran well ahead of the top of the ticket last year and crushed GOP state Sen. Jeff Stone 62-38. He also just reported raising $330,000 in the most recent quarter and has a hefty $1.8 million in the bank. But in the last week, Ruiz has landed two Republican opponents, both of whom hail from the world of television: Former local news anchor and Air Force vet Dan Ball and soap opera star Kimberlin Brown, a Trump surrogate who spoke at the Republican convention. Given how 2016 went down, though, it's hard to see either having much of a chance.
● MI-11: Democratic state Rep. Tim Greimel will join the primary for Michigan's 11th Congressional District, an open Republican-held seat that twists and turns to include some of Detroit's most upscale northwestern suburbs. Greimel has served in the state House since 2012 and was previously the party's minority leader, and before that he had held local office in suburban Oakland County.
Greimel's ties to party leadership should give him some major fundraising connections, but a few other Democrats have already joined the race and demonstrated their own fundraising chops, meaning he won't have a clear path to the nomination. Greimel will first have to get past Haley Stevens, who served as chief of staff for President Obama's 2009 Auto Task Force; Fayrouz Saad, who is the former director of immigration affairs for Detroit; and businessman Dan Haberman. This heavily gerrymandered district favored Trump 50-45 and Romney 52-47, but it's by far the most-educated seat in Michigan and could be fertile ground for a Trump backlash in 2018.
● NH-02: GOP state Rep. Steve Negron, who'd been considering a bid against Democratic Rep. Annie Kuster for a few weeks, has now jumped into the race and seeded his campaign with $116,000 of his own money. However, he'll need much more than that to wage a serious contest, though at least he's got better cash flow than former state House Majority Leader Jack Flanagan, who brought in just $23,000 in the third quarter. A third candidate, former Veterans Affairs official Stewart Levenson, didn't file a report because he entered the race after the quarterly deadline. While Kuster won re-election last year by a much closer-than-expected 49-45 margin, national Republicans don't seem to have shown a lot of interest in challenging her this cycle.
● NV-03: Autism advocate Lynda Tache, who was one of four notable Republicans running for Nevada's open 3rd Congressional District, has dropped out of the race. Tache just reported raising only $50,000 in her first quarterly fundraising report, so her departure isn't too surprising. However, the Republican field has gotten off to a slow start in this swingy district, and the GOP's fundraising leader, former Assemblywoman Victoria Seaman, pulled in a feeble $64,000. By contrast, the lone Democrat in the race, education activist Susie Lee, raised $315,000 in the third quarter, more than all the Republican candidates combined.
● NY-22: Former Rep. Richard Hanna retired from office last year rather than face a difficult Republican primary rematch against the far more hardline Claudia Tenney, who went on to win that year's election. Hanna was one of the least conservative Republicans during his three terms in the House, and he broke ranks to endorse Hillary Clinton during last year's general election, becoming the only congressional Republican to do so.
Although Hanna had said this summer that he was considering a comeback bid as an independent, his money tells a different story: Hanna donated $1,000 to Democratic state Assemblyman Anthony Brindisi, who is challenging Tenney this cycle. Amazingly, this isn't the first time that Hanna has supported giving money to Democrats. Back in 2012 at an Equal Rights Amendment rally, Hanna advised women to give to Democrats, saying, "Contribute your money to people who speak out on your behalf, because the other side—my side—has a lot of it."
National Democrats have touted Brindisi's candidacy. He also raised an imposing $413,000 during the third quarter and finished September with $400,000 in cash-on-hand. By contrast, Tenney raised just $212,000, but her head start allowed her to maintain a larger war chest of $527,000. This historically Republican district lurched from 49.2-48.8 Romney to 55-39 Trump last year, but Tenney has always been wildly out of step with the broader electorate. Although Hanna wasn't able to stop her from replacing him last year, the support of disaffected centrist Republicans such as himself will likely be key for Brindisi if Democrats are to succeed in flipping this seat next year.
● OH-01: Democrats just landed an unusual candidate in Ohio's 1st District: Rabbi Robert Barr, who, according to the Washington Post's Mark Oppenheimer, is just the third rabbi ever to run for Congress. Oppenheimer notes that, by one measure, Barr is the most traditional rabbi to do so, since he actually presides over a congregation and has done so since 1980. (The other two "running rabbis" were Dennis Shulman, whom you may remember as the blind rabbi who lost a 2008 race to now-former GOP Rep. Scott Garrett, and Shmuley Boteach, a one-time reality TV celebrity who took just 25 percent as a Republican against Democratic Rep. Bill Pascrell in 2012. Both contests took place in New Jersey, and neither rabbi had ever held a pulpit.)
Barr's synagogue, though, is decidedly untraditional: Though he was ordained as part of the Reform movement (the largest Jewish denomination in America), the congregation he leads is not part of any of the major branches of Judaism, but rather is identified with a small movement that Oppenheimer says is "loosely called humanistic Judaism." None of this is likely to matter on the campaign trail, though Oppenheimer points out that there's a small but growing contingent of members of Congress who describe themselves as "religiously skeptical, humanist or unaffiliated"—a trend that mirrors what's happening in the United States as a whole.
As for the race itself, Barr faces some serious obstacles. Since winning his seat back in the 2010 wave, GOP Rep. Steve Chabot has won re-election comfortably three times, particularly since his fellow Republicans made his Cincinnati-based seat redder in redistricting. Ohio's 1st would not, however, be out of reach for a Democrat in a good year, since Donald Trump carried it by a 51-45 margin. Indeed, at least one other Democrat, state Rep. Alicia Reece, is still considering a bid, and several others haven't ruled out the prospect, including former Rep. Steve Driehaus, who unseated Chabot in 2008 before getting booted himself the following cycle.
● PA-10: Well, we can scratch one special election off the calendar. On Tuesday, GOP Rep. Tom Marino withdrew from consideration as Donald Trump's drug czar following a devastating report in the Washington Post about legislation Marino had pushed through Congress at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry to deliberately hobble the DEA's ability to crack down on the black market flood of prescription narcotics.
There's no word yet as to whether Marino will seek re-election next year, but he's raised almost nothing all year, perhaps expecting that he'd be leaving the House soon. If he does decide to check out, plenty of Republicans will no doubt be interested in this sprawling seat that stretches from central Pennsylvania to the state's northeast corner and backed Trump by a very wide 66-30 margin.
● PA-18: This week, state Rep. Jason Ortitay joined the fray for the anticipated special election for Pennsylvania's 18th Congressional District, making him the fourth Republican to do so (all of whom, it so happens, are state legislators). Ortitay was first elected to the state House in 2014 and also runs a delicious-sounding enterprise called Jason's Cheesecake Company.
● TX-20: How odd. Former Republican Rep. Francisco "Quico" Canseco has decided to wage a comeback … but not in Texas' 23rd District, which he represented for a single term after winning it in the 2010 GOP wave. That seat's now occupied by a different Republican, Will Hurd, so Canseco is instead turning to the neighboring 20th District, which is occupied by Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro. It also happens to be a deep blue seat: Not only did Hillary Clinton carry it 61-34, but Republicans haven't even put up a candidate here since Castro first won it in 2012. Canseco, in other words, doesn't have a prayer, but perhaps he's just trying to raise money in the hopes that pending redistricting litigation will reshape another district more to his liking.