A fairly quiet Wednesday on the campaign trail, all in all. A couple of interesting polls, plus Rasmussen Reports makes a mistake that will do nothing to dispel the rapidly growing conventional wisdom on the left that they are Republican shills. Let's get after it.
AZ-Gov: Incumbent GOP Governor Trails In 2010 Re-Election Bid
Apparently, it isn't just Democratic governors that are under the gun of the recent political climate. According to a new statewide poll done by the team at PPP, incumbent Republican Governor Jan Brewer (who took over for Janet Napolitano when she moved into Obama's cabinet) is currently trailing her likely Democratic opponent, state Attorney General Terry Goddard, by a ten-point margin (46-36). Goddard also has leads over two other potential GOP rivals: state treasurer Dean Martin trails Goddard by eight (45-37), while former Governor Fife Symington gets crushed by the Democrat (52-29).
MO-Sen: Rasmussen Finds Competitive Open Seat Senate Race Tied
Given how Rasmussen's Senate polling has just been lousy for Democrats, this might qualify as a small victory. New numbers for Rasmussen have the open seat battle between Republican Roy Blunt and Democrat Robin Carnahan all knotted up at 46%. The most recent poll was a partisan poll (a Democratic poll done by GQR) which had Carnahan leading in single digits.
IA-Sen: Grassley With Healthy Lead, According to Rasmussen
Rasmussen also polls another Midwestern Senate race, and finds veteran Senator Chuck Grassley leading little-known former Democratic state legislator Bob Krause by twenty-six points (56-30). One eyebrow-raiser, while they decry Krause's lack of name recognition, they also claim that 37% of voters don't have an opinion of him. That would imply that he has 63% name recognition. That strikes me as awfully, awfully high for a guy who spent the last two decades working for the state Department of Transportation, and apparently hasn't been in elective office since the 1970s.
GA-Gov: Strategic Vision Drops In, Gets Same Results As Everyone
This one doesn't require too many words to explain: Republican pollsters Strategic Vision (who, in an unrelated note, just got spanked by the AAPOR) goes into Georgia, and basically gets the same numbers as everyone else. Roy Barnes and John Oxendine continue to lap the fields in the primaries. It has been a while, however, since a pollster has looked at the general election match-up between these two, as there is nothing to indicate that these won't be the nominees.
MN-Gov: Rasmussen Makes Mistake That Benefits GOP Politico
Earlier this week, Rasmussen went into Minnesota and polled the public climate for the office-holders there. This was not covered in the wrap, because the three names involved (Al Franken, Amy Klobuchar, and Tim Pawlenty) are not on the ballot in the 2010 elections. What it did show that while Franken had net positives (41/31), they were less than both Klobuchar and the newly-minted right-winger Tim Pawlenty. This made its way into a variety of tradmed stories, but Jonathan Singer at MyDD made a great catch: Pawlenty's question was based on the traditional four-option menu of "strongly approve", "somewhat approve", "somewhat disapprove", "strongly disapprove". The Democrats were based on a four-option menu which asked if voters through their performance was "excellent", "good", "fair", or "poor". Research has shown that the former arrangement leads to better numbers in the top two boxes, because some voters will conflate a "fair" performance with one that is worthy of the rating "slightly approve". Not only that, but in a subtle wording change, it said Pawlenty was "doing a job" as governor, while it said Franken was "performing a role" as senator. When Mark Blumenthal went to Rasmussen Reports with a query about this, he was told it was a "mistake that slipped through the cracks."
MA-Sen: Reconciled Bill Clears Legislature, One More Hurdle To Clear
A reconciled bill to give Governor Deval Patrick the power to name an interim appointment to the U.S. Senate in the wake of the death of Senator Edward Kennedy pased the Massachusetts legislature today, but not without a new hurdle popping up in his path. Because the bill did not pass with the support of two-thirds of the legislature, it is not supposed to take effect for 90 days. As a practical matter, this would push the appointment into late December. Governor Deval Patrick can have the measure declared an emergency measure, meaning it will take immediate effect. Unsurprisingly, the state GOP has threatened a lawsuit if Patrick attempted that procedural move, bottling up the appointment even further. If the appointment ever gets made, it now appears that former DNC Chairman and longtime Kennedy aide and confidant Paul Kirk is the favorite to receive the appointment.
NJ-Gov: Christie's Investment Gambit Becomes Glass House Issue
Last week, in an effort to raise ethical questions about incumbent Governor Jon Corzine, the New Jersey GOP (on behalf of their gubernatorial nominee Chris Christie) claimed that some hedge fund investments created a conflict of interest for the Governor, because the firm in question had financial interests in casinos (Corzine countered that the hedge fund's holdings are a separately-held entity from the parent company that has interest in the casinos). Less than a week after GOP critics tried to flog that story, we learned that GOP nominee Chris Christie owned stock in a travel/real estate firm that was under investigation by his U.S. Attorney's office. While Christie's assets are managed by a financial advisor (ironically, from Goldman Sachs, the former home of...Jon Corzine), he had previously stated that "he uses a financial adviser but kept 'an eye on' the stocks chosen to avoid conflicts with investigations and 'to make sure that we weren't in anything that we had a problem with.'" When asked about the stock investment today, Christie acknowledged having seen it in disclosure statements, but made clear that he did not have a hand in the purchase or sale of any of the stocks, leaving those decisions to his financial advisor.