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Leading Off:
• NYC Mayor, Comptroller: Ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner's fade continues, with Siena confirming his slide into fourth place in their latest poll for the New York Times. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn leads the way in the Democratic primary with 25 percent, followed by former Comptroller Bill Thompson at 16, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio at 14, and Weiner at 10. Last month, Quinn had a 27-18 advantage over Weiner, with de Blasio and Thompson tied at 11, and at the time, Siena offered a rare bit of good polling news for Quinn, since everyone else showed Weiner surging. Ah, how times have changed.
There are also some numbers on the Democratic primary for comptroller, where ex-Gov. Eliot Spitzer is beating Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer 44-35. If you're wondering about the high numbers of undecideds in both contests, note that Siena is still, for some reason, testing only registered voters rather than likely voters, even though the election is little over a month away.
P.S. The New York Times has a good interactive chart comparing the results of every mayoral poll taken this year, from all pollsters. You can also narrow down the numbers by sex or race.
Senate:
• AR-Sen: So a bunch of op-eds that GOP Rep. Tom Cotton penned while a junior at Harvard have now come to light, and, unsurprisingly, they reflect some pretty typical College Republican sentiments. (Dave Weigel has rounded up a number of excerpts.) Probably the most unhelpful to Cotton are his remarks about women, marriage and divorce:
"Feminists say no fault divorce was a large hurdle on the path to female liberation," Cotton wrote. "They apparently don't consult the deepest hopes or greatest fears of young women."
Cotton, who is unmarried, wrote that he surveyed several women—whom he referred to as "Cliffies," or female students at Radcliffe—and they all told him the same thing: that their "greatest fear" in life was to be left by their husbands, and their "deepest hope" was to be "a good wife and mother." To that end, he says, feminists should stop trying to make it easier to get divorced.
"If men have easy access to divorce, many will choose it thoughtlessly," he wrote. "They may not gain true happiness with their new trophy wives, but they certainly will not slide into the material indigence and emotional misery that awaits most divorced women."
Unfortunately, though, in socially conservative Arkansas, I'm not sure how much mileage Dem Sen. Mark Pryor will be able to get out of this kind of thing. Now, if someone could find a piece where Cotton advocated dismantling Social Security, that would be another story.
• NH-Sen: While state Sen. Jeb Bradley spends time making stupid jokes about his non-candidacy, New Hampshire Republicans still have no actual candidates to take on Sen. Jeanne Shaheen next year, and things are starting to look really thin. The latest name to surface is that of conservative activist Karen Testerman, who just formed an exploratory committee. Testerman's only prior run for office came in 2010, when she finished with just 10 percent of the vote in the GOP gubernatorial primary.
Gubernatorial:
• KS-Gov: It looks like Kansas Democrats have landed a legitimate candidate to take on Gov. Sam Brownback. State House Minority Leader Paul Davis, whom we mentioned last month, has created a campaign committee; while he hasn't formally declared yet, he's promising an announcement one way or the other in the "coming weeks," as the AP puts it. He also has an early endorsement from former Board of Regents member Jill Docking, who previously hadn't ruled out a bid, though presumably this means she won't run herself. While a Democratic victory in Kansas would be an upset for the ages, Brownback is unpopular enough that it's worth keeping half an eye on this one.
• MA-Gov: New cash-on-hand figures are available for the main contenders for next year's open gubernatorial race in Massachusetts, and Treasurer Steve Grossman leads the Democratic field by a big margin, with $597,000 in the bank as of the end of June. Former Medicare official Don Berwick has $263,000, while state AG Martha Coakley (who hasn't actually announced yet) has $278,000. State Sen. Dan Wolf has just $23,000, though he could conceivably self-fund (if he isn't barred from running altogether, due to an ethics commission ruling that he has a conflict of interest). The two highest-profile potential Republicans, 2010 nominee Charlie Baker and ex-Sen. Scott Brown, both have very little money, just $29,000 and $8,000 respectively.
• NE-Gov: State Sen. Steve Lathrop, who had been considered a top-tier Democratic recruit for Nebraska's open-seat gubernatorial race, has decided not to run. However, Democrats already have two notable candidates in the contest, both of whom have won elective office before: former University of Nebraska Regent Chuck Hassebrook (who briefly ran for Senate last year), and state Sen. Annette Dubas, who just announced.
• WA-Gov/Sen: One rule in Washington politics is that every two years, someone has to ask GOP Rep. Dave Reichert if he's potentially interested in running for governor or senator, and every two years, Reichert is obligated to say yes. Here's the latest installment, but the thing is, the Evergreen State won't host elections for either post until 2016, so check back in again in a couple more years.
House:
• LA-06: State Sen. Rick Ward, who recently switched to the Republican Party and then announced he was looking at a bid for Louisiana's open 6th Congressional District, has made it official. The field here has still been very slow to form, and Ward is actually the first prominent candidate to get into the race in this solidly red district.
Other Races:
• CO Recall: In both Colorado recalls, proponents and opponents have each been given the chance to place 300-word statements directly on the ballots that will go to voters, allowing them to make their case in an unusually direct way. While Democratic state Sens. John Morse and Angela Giron focus on broader reasons why they should stay in office (the former on public safety, the latter on children), recall supporters talk only about guns guns guns, eschewing the chance to offer a message that might appeal to a wider swath of the electorate.
• VA-St. House: Geoffrey Skelley at Larry Sabato's place has a new analysis of the Virginia state House, one of just three legislative bodies up for election this November. Republicans currently hold a 66-32 majority, and when they redrew the lines in 2011, they created a brutally tough gerrymander, so Democratic pickup opportunities are scarce. But one key reason why I mention Skelley's piece is that he makes use of our awesome new presidential results by legislative district, and one thing it shows is that Democrats hold just three seats where Obama took less than 60 percent of the vote. That shows you how much Democratic performance drops off in odd-numbered years in Virginia, and combined with the GOP's map, it makes taking back the House exceptionally hard.