Leading Off
● Candidates: It’s the start of a new election season, and as always at Daily Kos Elections, we’re seeing long lists of politicians who are talking about running for U.S. Senate, for governor, for the U.S. House, for mayor, and oh yeah, for the presidency. It’s also the start of a new season where some of those same politicians keep us guessing about what they actually plan to do.
Campaign Action
When we cover a potential candidate, one thing we always scrutinize closely is just how clearly they’re making their intentions known. Ideally, someone thinking about running for office would give us an unambiguous answer about their plans, along the lines of “I’m running,” “I’m not running,” or “I’m thinking about running.” However, many politicians instead like keeping people wondering by making opaque statements. Even worse, media coverage often glosses over ambiguities and transforms vague remarks into definitive pronouncements, confusing readers and other would-be candidates alike.
To take just one of many examples, back in May 2017, Arizona Rep. Kyrsten Sinema set off a wave of panic among Democrats when she appeared to announce that she wouldn’t run for the Senate the following year. Sinema, widely regarded as the strongest Democratic option in the state, was asked in an interview if she would seek Jeff Flake’s Senate seat and responded, “I'm running for re-election.” To many, that sounded like she was announcing that she was seeking a fourth term in the House—and that Team Blue had better hurry up and find another Senate recruit. In reality, Sinema wasn’t doing anything of the kind, since she didn’t ever say she wasn’t running for a promotion, or even address the Senate race.
However, not everyone paid close attention to what Sinema was or wasn’t really saying. Her representatives reportedly called state Democrats concerned that she wouldn’t run to reassure them that “nothing’s changed.” And in a text message exchange later that day, Sinema told a reporter, “I've said what I always say. I'm currently running for re-election.” The emphasis there is ours, but that word “currently” should have popped out at all reporters.
Indeed, at the end of September 2017, about five months after she seemed to announce she was going to seek re-election to the House, Sinema declared she was running for the Senate. This month, she was sworn in as Arizona’s first Democratic senator in 24 years.
As the Sinema kerfuffle shows, when a politician appears to say that they’re not interested in running for something, we need to be careful to figure out what they’re actually saying. After all, it’s very easy for someone to make it clear they really and truly aren’t interested in an office. All the way back in 1884, when Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman was considered as a possible Republican candidate for president, he made it emphatically obvious that he’d have no part in such a venture. Sherman famously declared, “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected,” in what later became known as the proverbial “Shermanesque” statement.
Still, plenty of potential candidates are clever about acting as though they’re issuing Shermanesque statements while actually signaling to supporters that they’re really doing no such thing. None other than World War II hero Dwight Eisenhower did this in June 1945 just after the conflict in Europe had ended, telling reporters he had “no political ambitions at all.” Said Ike, “I'd like to go further than Sherman in expressing myself on this subject.” Eisenhower of course very much sought and accepted the GOP presidential nomination in 1952—and served for eight years after he was elected.
So was Eisenhower lying back then? Not exactly. As historian Jean Edward Smith would point out in his biography Eisenhower: In War and Peace, the general “cited Sherman but did not use Sherman’s words—which were absolute. To say ‘I’d like to go even further than Sherman’ is not the same as saying categorically that he would not serve if elected.” Smith continued, “By appearing to take himself out of contention but not actually doing so, Eisenhower had implicitly announced his availability.” In other words, Ike was playing a political game that continues to this day, and that any political observer needs to play, too.
So, why can’t people outright just say they’re interested in running for office if they’re, you know, interested in running for office? In some cases, like Eisenhower, the would-be candidate may have a strong nonpolitical image that they want to keep intact for as long as possible ahead of a campaign. Eisenhower, who knew what it was like to take incoming fire, understood that the sooner he started openly eyeing the presidency, the sooner he would be attacked, so why get involved in partisan warfare before he needed to?
Of course, most politicians are not in Dwight Eisenhower’s enviable situation, but they may still have a variety of different reasons for being cagey. Some may just want to appear that they’re only running for a promotion out of a sense of obligation to their country—rather than because of their personal ambitions—and don’t want to appear to be over-eager. Others, like Ike, may just want to avoid getting attacked early. Still others may actually be leaning against running, but they don’t want to outright say no just in case they have a change of heart. And some simply want to take advantage of campaign finance loopholes unavailable to declared candidates. Many other reasons no doubt abound.
And along with politicians who sound like they’ve decided not to run for office, we often have to deal with the opposite issue: people who give every signal that they plan to run but haven’t outright announced that they will. In fairness, most potential candidates who prepare for a campaign end up pulling the trigger—but not all. As we at Daily Kos Election always like to remind readers, someone isn’t running for office until they announce they’re running for office. Until that magic moment, they can always back down.
Indeed, we’ve seen plenty examples of these almost-candidates deciding not to become candidates. In 2011, GOP Rep. Trent Franks was preparing to run for what was then an open Senate seat in Arizona, and indeed, his own consultant confirmed to reporter Dave Catanese that he was going to kick off a bid, complete with date and time of announcement. But just a day prior, Franks shockingly pulled the plug without explanation.
We never knew why Franks changed course so suddenly until six years later, when he resigned from the House in disgrace because, among many other things, he'd offered to pay millions of dollars to two female staffers to serve as surrogate mothers for him and his wife. As word of Franks’ transgressions leaked out, the Arizona Republic reported that back in 2011, an unnamed operative told the would-be Senate candidate that there was a "file" on Franks that had been shared with the congressman to deter him from running. That seems to have triggered Franks’ abrupt about-face, though he still held onto his House seat for years afterwards until his swift fall from grace.
But it doesn’t necessarily take an explosive scandal to keep a candidate out of a race. In 2017, Missouri Rep. Ann Wagner gave every indication that she wanted to run against Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, even raising millions ahead of a planned Senate campaign. But in July of that year, Wagner surprisingly announced that she wouldn’t go for it, reportedly because the GOP powers-that-be preferred Attorney General Josh Hawley (who ran and won).
And sometimes, we just don’t know why a person who sounds very likely to run doesn’t end up going through with it. In 2015, GOP Rep. Jeff Miller gave every indication that he would seek what was (at the time) an open Senate seat in Florida. Miller even acknowledged in July he was putting together a campaign team and was raising money, though he insisted that he wasn’t going to make a final decision until “after August.”
We thought this was just some pseudo-indecision, but mere days later, he announced that he wasn’t running after all. Miller gave no explanation for this sudden about-face other than that he wanted to focus on his duties as chair of the Veterans Affairs committee, a job he was soon set to lose anyway because of the Republican Party's self-imposed term limits. Ultimately, Miller wound up not even seeking re-election the following year. We still don’t know why he never ran for the Senate—perhaps he had a prophetic dream that Marco Rubio would get obliterated by Donald Trump and come crawling back to Florida. What we can say, though, is that he and others are a good reminder that no one is a candidate until they say they’re a candidate.
There are some big lessons for politicos from all this. As we said at the top, it’s important to take a look at what would-be candidates are actually saying when they seem to announce they are or are not running for office. As many people learned the hard way from Sinema, a statement like “I'm running for re-election” is very different from “I’m not running for Senate.”
Not everyone needs to go as far as Minnesota Republican Pat Garofalo, who memorably said that he "would rather stick a fork in my eye than run for Congress,” though we do very much appreciate that kind of clarity. However, in the absence of any eyeballs getting impaled on cutlery, we keep an eye on potential candidates who issue ambiguous statements unless they: (a) clearly say they’re running; (b) clearly say they’re not running; (c) endorse another candidate for the position; or (d) the filing deadline passes and it’s simply too late for them to run.
Conversely, we don’t classify someone as a candidate until they announce they’re running or until candidate filing closes and their name is on the ballot. All of this may seem nitpicky, but as Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and never-Arizona Sen. Trent Franks have taught us, it’s necessary.
Gubernatorial
● KY-Gov: State House Democratic Leader Rocky Adkins has announced on Tuesday that he raised $622,000 from the time he launched his campaign in mid-November to the end of 2018, and he had $581,000 in the bank. Attorney General Andy Beshear, meanwhile, previously said he took in $455,000 during the final quarter of last year and has $852,000 on-hand. A third Democratic candidate, former state Auditor Adam Edelen, only kicked off his campaign this year.
● NC-Gov: The Democratic firm Public Policy Polling is out with their first look at the 2020 landscape in their home state of North Carolina, and they give Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper some good news. Cooper posts a positive 44-35 approval rating a little less than two years before he faces voters, and PPP also finds him leading all his hypothetical GOP opponents:
- 45-41 vs. former Gov. Pat McCrory
- 46-37 vs. Sen. Thom Tillis
- 47-35 vs. Lt. Gov. Dan Forest
- 48-34 vs. state Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger
- 46-32 vs. state House Speaker Tim Moore
Some of these matchups, though, are a lot more likely to happen than others. Forest made it pretty plain that he plans to run back in August, though he has yet to announce he's in. McCrory, whom Cooper narrowly unseated in 2016, also said this month that he was considering another bid.
By contrast, Tillis announced last year that he was seeking re-election to the Senate in 2020, and we haven't heard any indication he's remotely interested in changing course and running for governor instead. We also haven't heard anything about either Berger or Moore challenging Cooper.
House
● CO-04: On Wednesday, multiple media outlets reported that Rep. Ken Buck is expected to run for state GOP chair. Notably, Joe St. George, a reporter for a local Fox affiliate, said that it was "a possibility" that Buck would resign from his safely red eastern Colorado seat if he were picked.
A state party spokesperson said that he was unaware of any reason that the chair couldn't be a sitting elected official, though he added he didn't know of any time that this has ever happened. However, it's possible that the State Central Committee, the collection of roughly 500 party insiders who will choose the new party chair on March 30, will insist that the winner makes leading the Colorado GOP his or her sole focus. (Of note: Former New York Rep. Joe Crowley was also chair of the Queens County Democratic Party. Make of that what you will.)
Buck has not commented about his interest in either this post or in leaving Congress. However, this isn't the first time that Buck, who was first elected in 2014, has eyed the exits. In July 2017, Buck said that if GOP Attorney General Cynthia Coffman ran for governor, he would be interested in running to succeed her. However, while Coffman did end up launching what would ultimately be a disastrous gubernatorial bid a few months later, Buck decided to stay put.
So why is Buck apparently so keen to run the Colorado Republican Party, which has just come off an awful 2018 cycle? An unnamed GOP source tells St. George that Buck wants to better position himself for a 2022 rematch with Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, to whom he rather infamously lost in 2010 by a 48-46 margin, despite the year's epic GOP wave.
Buck's Senate dreams weren't dashed by that bad experience, though, and he kicked off a campaign against Democratic Sen. Mark Udall in 2013. But Buck dropped out the next year when then-Rep. Cory Gardner kicked off what would be a successful Senate campaign of his own, and Buck sought and won Gardner's open House seat instead. Apparently, Buck still hasn't given up hope getting to the upper chamber even if he needs to take the often-thankless job of state party chair first in order to do it.
● IA-04: White supremacist Rep. Steve King picked up a foe in next year’s Republican primary on Wednesday when state Sen. Randy Feenstra announced that he would challenge the incumbent in western Iowa's 4th Congressional District. Feenstra argued that Donald Trump “needs effective conservative leaders in Congress who will not only support his agenda, but actually get things done,” saying King no longer fits the bill. Rather, Feenstra declared, King’s “caustic nature has left us without a seat at the table.”
Feenstra may be right, but it’s not the first time a dissatisfied Republican legislator has risen up to take on King: In 2016, then-state Sen. Rick Bertrand did just that, but not too surprisingly, King won that battle by a convincing 65-35 margin. However, there’s reason to think that Feenstra might be a stronger opponent than his old legislative colleague was.
Bertrand entered the race less than three months before the primary and raised very little cash in that short timeframe. Feenstra is starting considerably earlier, and as the chair of the influential tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, he likely has access to far more influential donors.
Notably, Feenstra has also signed on Matt Leopold, a well-connected operative who was GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds' political director during her successful 2018 re-election bid, another indication that the senator is capable of running a serious race. In addition, the Iowa Republican Party quickly announced it would remain neutral, which could be seen as a blow to King since, as The Guardian's Ben Jacobs notes, the state party has taken quite a hostile stance toward potential Trump challengers.
King's own position, meanwhile, seems to have gotten weaker since his easy 2016 win, as evidence by the remarkably complacent campaign he ran against Democrat J.D. Scholten last year. The incumbent raised very little money and allowed Scholten, who tapped into King-hating donors from across the country, to have the airwaves to himself for weeks. King only began running his first TV ad about a week-and-a-half before Election Day―a spot that was lazily recycled from his 2014 campaign.
What King was doing rather than running ads was rubbing shoulders with international white supremacist candidates and hate groups. This included an August meeting with the far-right Austrian Freedom Party—which has historical ties to the Nazi Party—that King took during a trip to eastern Europe. Gallingly, that junket was paid for by a Holocaust memorial group.
During this same trip, King also gave an interview to a website allied with the Freedom Party where he asked what diversity brings to America "that we don't have that is worth the price?” adding, “We have a lot of diversity within the U.S. already." King also used that same interview to call Jewish philanthropist George Soros a force behind the so-called "Great Replacement," a conspiracy theory prevalent on the far-right that white Europeans are being deliberately "replaced" by people of color in a scheme fomented by Jews.
While congressional Republicans and King's donors had tolerated his racism for years with at most just minor rebukes, they finally went a bit further than usual in the days leading up to the election. Even NRCC chair Steve Stivers, who just a day after the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre defended the anti-Semitic ads his committee had been running elsewhere, tweeted out a condemnation. Stivers declared that King's "recent comments, actions, and retweets are completely inappropriate." He added, "We must stand up against white supremacy and hate in all forms, and I strongly condemn this behavior."
While King’s dalliances with the David Duke set might not ordinarily have turned off voters in this very conservative district, they unquestionably did him harm, perhaps because he gained a reputation as a showboater more concerned with his international standing among fascists than with the folks back home in western Iowa. We know this because, in the end, King turned back Scholten by just a 50-47 margin.
That showing was not only the weakest general election performance of King’s career, it represented a steep dropoff from Trump’s 61-34 victory in Iowa’s 4th District in 2016. Reynolds also carried the seat by a wide 59-39 margin during her successful re-election campaign for governor while King was only scraping by, another sign that plenty of otherwise reliably conservative voters had tired of King.
Still, it’s far too early to write King’s political obituary. To begin with, there’s reason to think that the district’s GOP base is still on his side. A Siena poll for the New York Times taken just before Election Day last year found that, while King had an underwater 45-46 approval rating among the district’s likely voters, he posted a very strong 78-14 score among registered Republicans. (That same survey found King leading Scholten 47-42, very close to his margin of victory days later, so it seems to have done a good job modeling the local electorate.) King also has always had a following among the area’s influential social conservatives, which could make all the difference in a primary.
King’s antics are also unlikely to alienate Trump, and a single tweet could help the incumbent shore up his support at home. King also seems to have realized early that he can’t ignore his district again and hope to stay in office: After spurning voter meetings for years, he announced shortly before Feenstra got in that he’d be holding town halls in each of the district’s 39 counties.
● NC-03: GOP Rep. Walter Jones is retiring from this 61-37 Trump seat along the North Carolina coast, and one former primary foe is showing some interest in succeeding him. Former Craven County Commissioner Scott Dacey, who lost to Jones in 2018, told the National Journal's Alex Clearfield that he could "perhaps" run again, but that he had no timeline to decide. Dacey added that he's working on repairing his home after it was damaged by Hurricane Florence last year.
Dacey campaigned against the incumbent last cycle by arguing that the district needed a reliable Trump ally instead of Jones, an iconoclast who's often at odds with the administration. Dacey ended up raising a total of $417,000 for his bid while self-funding another $135,000, and he decisively outspent Jones in the lead up to the primary. However, Jones ended up winning renomination with 43 percent of the vote while 2016 candidate Phil Law, a retired Marine who raised very little cash, edged Dacey 29-28 for second place.
● Redistricting: Daily Kos Elections' Stephen Wolf will be moderating a panel on redistricting reform at the University of Southern California's Schwarzenegger Institute on Thursday, featuring organizers of 2018's successful state reform ballot measures and more. The panel is scheduled for 1 PM ET and will be a livestreamed for viewing online here, though proceedings may not begin until closer to 1:30. Please tune in!
Legislative
● Special Elections: Here's our recap of Tuesday's two races:
GA HD-05: This race will head to a runoff after no candidate won 50 percent of the vote. Jesse Vaughn and Matt Barton, both Republicans, will be the participants in the Feb. 5 election. Vaughn led the way with 34 percent while Barton finished second with 23. Rounding out the crowded field was Scott Tidwell with 21 percent, Larry Massey Jr. with 15 percent, Brian Rosser (the race's only Democrat) with 5 percent, and Steve Cochran with 3 percent.
VA SD-33: Democrat Jennifer Boysko romped to a nearly 40-point win over Republican Joe May in the race to succeed Jennifer Wexton. Not only did Boysko crush May, she widely outperformed recent presidential results in this district: Hillary Clinton's 63-31 win in 2016 and Barack Obama's 59-39 win in 2012. Additionally, Boysko's win keeps the GOP's control over the Senate at just a 21-19 split, meaning Democrats need to win just one seat to take back the chamber in November, when all seats are up. You can keep track of how all special election results this cycle compare to presidential results with our continually updated tracker.