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10:37 AM PT: AZ-02: The last remaining uncalled federal race in the nation is the battle between Democratic Rep. Ron Barber and Republican Martha McSally, who currently leads by just 161 votes out of 219,000 cast. Because of the tight margin, officials were set to begin a mandatory recount on Monday, though there's no reason to think McSally's lead won't hold up. The election director for Pima County, by far the larger of the two counties that make up Arizona's 2nd District, has estimated it would take two weeks to conduct the recount.
Barber had previously asked a court to order that 133 rejected ballots be tallied, but in an unusual Thanksgiving Day ruling, the judge rejected his request, saying that even if all 133 were counted, McSally would still win. Barber has not yet decided whether he'll appeal the ruling, perhaps waiting on the results of the recount to determine if an appeal would even be worth pursuing.
10:45 AM PT: NH-Sen: James Pindell reports that Shawn O'Connor, a businessman who moved from New York City to New Hampshire just last year, has begun laying the groundwork for a bid against Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte. O'Connor may have some money, but he doesn't appear to have much in the way of political experience or ties to the Granite State. Ayotte won't be easy to beat, but Democrats have plenty of options to choose from, and unless everyone takes a pass, O'Connor is unlikely to be the answer.
10:51 AM PT: (dreaminonempty): Ballot Measures: Some things we can all agree on—more or less. A few ballot measures across the country managed to find strong support (or lack thereof) across both red and blue counties. Below are maps of two of the most dramatic examples, compared to the vote for Senate in each state. You can see that the range of support for Arkansas' minimum wage hike (which passed overwhelmingly) and Oregon's attempt to move to a top-two primary system (which got crushed) were both much narrower than the range of Senate preference, although the two were not totally unrelated in each case:
For more on this year's initiatives, see
David Jarman's recent roundup.
11:20 AM PT: AK-Sen, AR-Sen: In the midst of a general-ish Politico piece about how the NRSC plans to approach the 2016 elections, when the Senate GOP will be playing a lot of defense, there are a couple of references to a pair of possible Democratic comeback attempts. Alaska's Mark Begich says "we'll see" if he'll run against Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski in two years' time, though a bid against Rep. Don Young, who's much less popular (and ethically tainted), would probably be easier.
At least a Begich run would make sense. Though there's no direct quote from him, outgoing Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor also apparently said something similarly non-committal with regard to running against GOP Sen. John Boozman, but a repeat effort would make no sense at all. Begich lost by 2 points in a state that's actually been edging toward Democrats on the presidential level; Pryor got obliterated by 18 points in a state that's moved very sharply away from Team Blue. Even with presidential-year turnout, that trend isn't going to change in 2016.
12:40 PM PT (David Jarman): Census: Over the Thanksgiving holiday, 538's Ben Casselman came out with not one but three articles on the big issues facing the U.S. Census for its 2020 version: how to classify Arab-Americans (who currently don't have a category, leaving them to decide whether to be 'white' or 'other'), whether to promote "Hispanic" to a race or to keep it as an ethnicity (which, again, leaves Hispanics to decide whether to be 'white,' 'black,' 'other,' or 'two or more'), and how to deal with households led by same-sex couples in view of how their legal status may vary from state to state (which still doesn't get at the question of how many LGBT singles there are). These are all topics we've discussed in the digest over recent years, but Casselman's articles go into more depth than we've usually seen elsewhere.
Speaking of the Census, Monday was also the rollout date for the newest version of American Community Survey data (the five-year sample is now up to the 2009-2013 timeframe); these survey-based estimates become more and more important for knowing the real state of the country as we move further away from the hard count in 2010, and the five-year samples (as opposed to the three-year and one-year samples) are the most reliable. The most noteworthy addition, though, is that the Census website's American Fact Finder now provides data down to the census block group level, instead of just the census tract level! That may sound like a boring technical distinction, but for those who really want to drill down, it's like the difference between using a magnifying glass and a microscope.
1:12 PM PT: OR-Gov, CA-Gov: Fellow Democrats John Kitzhaber (Oregon) and Jerry Brown (California) pulled off unlikely feats last month: They became only the 10th and 11th governors in U.S. history to win a fourth four-year term. Iowa Republican Terry Branstad, meanwhile, won an unprecedented sixth term Term-limits and two-year terms (once a more common phenomenon) have combined to make this accomplishment both quite rare and quite recent. The first person to join the "4 by 4" club was New York Republican Nelson Rockefeller, who was elected to a fourth term in 1970 but didn't finish it out because he was appointed vice president by Gerald Ford.
1:16 PM PT: LA-Sen: How hosed is Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu? This hosed. During the early voting period ahead of Saturday's runoff, registered Republicans cast 4 percent more ballots than they did during early voting before the November jungle primary. Democrats, meanwhile, cast 18 percent fewer votes. Considering that Landrieu took just 42 percent last month, the only conclusions you can draw are pretty stark.
1:26 PM PT: FL-Gov: It looks like the nascent movement to return Florida's gubernatorial elections to presidential years—which is when they used to be held—is gaining a little steam. Though it's still a bit vague (and it's early yet), the Miami Herald reports that "strategists are plotting" to put an amendment on the ballot in 2016, and that they've "sought legal guidance from Jon Mills," a law school dean and former state House speaker.
The lead operative appears to be Ben Pollara, who worked on this year's effort to legalize medical marijuana. That measure failed even though 58 percent of voters supported it, because it takes 60 percent to change the state constitution—a hurdle that supporters of changing the timing of gubernatorial elections would also face.
1:55 PM PT: AZ-Sen: If John McCain wants to ward off a primary challenge, he should probably make up his mind about whether he'll seek a sixth term right quick. Of course, cat fud lovers would be delighted if he went slowly, since that just gives the leopards more time to lick their chops. The latest big cat on the prowl is former GoDaddy attorney Christine Jones, who finished a distant third in the GOP primary for governor this year but says she "may" run for office "again in the future." At one point during the gubernatorial campaign, though, Jones looked like a real contender, and she has some powerful friends, so she could be a real threat.
Meanwhile, Republican Rep. David Schweikert, probably the biggest, meanest panthera who'd like to chow on McCain's political carcass, says he won't "even think about it" until after the winter holidays. However, Schweikert noted, he's earned his way back on to the powerful Financial Services Committee (after John Boehner removed him to punish him for being a pain in the ass in 2012), so that might hold his interest more than a possible Senate bid.
2:07 PM PT: Polarization: The ever-increasing partisanization of the United States isn't news to readers of the Digest, but Greg Giroux's breakdown of where things stand now is interesting nevertheless. Assuming Mary Landrieu loses Saturday, 84 senators will come from states also won by their party's presidential candidate, the most in over 60 years. Meanwhile, only 31 House seats will be represented by opposite-party candidates, which includes a mere five Democrats who hold seats Mitt Romney carried. That's actually a slight uptick from the 26 in the previous Congress, but only thanks to this year's GOP wave.
3:09 PM PT: Polltopia: In 2012, we had a pretty clear case of public polls and Democratic internals saying one thing, while Republican surveys said another, and we all know who turned out to be right. But this year, after many GOP firms tried to revamp their operations, there was a lot more harmony among pollsters of all stripes—and everyone turned out to be wrong. It's incredibly hard to say what happened, but Politico's Steven Shepard talked to a lot of Republican pollsters to find out why, for the most part, they didn't predict their party would do as well as it did.
There are no truly satisfying answers, though one nameless operative offers what might be the best take: "I believe there were some pollsters that were holding their data back because of what happened in '12. I think they were covering their ass." That is to say, firms preferred to offer an excessively conservative outlook (perhaps both to their clients and the public) so that if GOP candidates again fell short, they wouldn't look as foolish as they had two years ago. If so, it wasn't a bad strategy, because Republican pollsters certainly aren't coming under near as much criticism this time for undershooting as they did for overshooting in 2012.
3:15 PM PT: Nevada: When Jon Ralston compliments you for something you've written about Nevada politics, that's a little bit like Michael Jordan saying you're pretty good at basketball. So don't take it from me that you should read Steve Singiser's excellent dissection of the Democratic debacle in the Silver State this year; just listen to Ralston, who dubs the piece a proverbial "smart take." Indeed it is.