Republican Rep. Tim Huelskamp has made some real enemies during his time in Congress
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• KS-01: Republican Rep. Tim Huelskamp's entire congressional career seems to be a bizarre experiment where he tests how many people he can piss off, but still keep on winning. Huelskamp has had a poor relationship with the House leadership, with him dramatically voting against John Boehner in the 2013 speakership race. Perhaps more seriously, Huelskamp's attempts to cut farm subsidies have aliented plenty of his constituents in this rural western Kansas seat, and left him on the outs with powerful interests like the Kansas Farm Bureau. In August, Huelskamp turned back an underfunded primary challenge from Alan LaPolice by only 55-45, and plenty of ambitious Republicans smell blood.
Over at Roll Call, Alexis Levinson reports that several potential candidates are already looking at a primary challenge. State Sen. Garrett Love seems to be attracting the most attention, and he's reportedly thinking about it. Physician Roger Marshall has also been noticed, and he confirms that he isn't ruling out a run. Tracey Mann, who ran for this seat against Huelskamp in 2010, has also been named: Mann took third place in that contest, trailing Huelskamp 35-21. One person who doesn't appear to be interested is former Senate President David Kerr, who said he doesn't think a run is "in the cards." Whoever emerges as the congressman's main foe can expect some support from energy businessman Cecil O'Brate, who spent on LaPolice when few others would.
But a campaign against Huelskamp won't be a slam dunk. As Levinson writes, the incumbent is looking to repair his damaged relationship with the state Farm Bureau, and there's a good chance that a clown car full of candidates will split the anti-Huelskamp vote enough to let him win with a plurality. Huelskamp also has some tea party flavored outside group allies, and they will likely come to his aid if they feel he needs help. There's also the possibility that Huelskamp runs for the U.S. Senate against fellow Republican Jerry Moran rather than for re-election. All the action will be in the primary in this Romney 70-28 seat, but it looks like we can expect an interesting race one way or another.
Gubernatorial:
• MI-Gov: Democrat Mark Schauer fell 4 points short in his quest to unseat Republican Gov. Rick Snyder last month, and his narrow defeat still has him frustrated. In an interview with The Detroit News, Schauer describes his bewilderment with how weak Democratic turnout was. Schauer's campaign saw 2010 as the low-watermark for turnout and was surprised to see 80,000 fewer voters show up this time. While Schauer believes he had an effective message, he just couldn't connect to the voters he needed to show up.
While Schauer doesn't sound completely done with politics, it looks like his days as an elected official are over. He declared, "It's unlikely I'll be on the ballot again as a partisan candidate." This is far from an ironclad declaration though.
• MO-Gov: Democratic Attorney General Chris Koster has been preparing for a 2016 gubernatorial run since time immemorial, but he's already encountering some turbulence. Back in October the New York Times reported that Koster took $33,500 from Pfizer and lawyers connected to it, then helped negotiate a very favorable settlement for the company in a fraud case. Koster is defending himself, citing a staffer's mistake as the reason Missouri didn't take part in an investigation that brought other states more money.
On Monday Koster tried to turn things around at a legislative hearing, arguing that the legislature is the one that needs ethics reform. Koster is also citing his new policy on lobbyist gifts, saying he's stricter than any other attorney general in the country. Maybe Koster can put this whole mess behind him before 2016 rolls around, but given how hostile Missouri is becoming toward Democrats, he can't afford to allow this kind of story to define him.
Koster's problems help explain why Sen. Claire McCaskill is looking at a run here. As we've argued before, it may be better for both of them if she was the Democratic standard bearer instead. If McCaskill won she would be able avoid a potentially tough 2018 re-election, where midterm turnout could cause her problems. Furthermore, if she appointed Koster to her seat, he'd have another two years for this story to become a distant memory. Of course McCaskill isn't the most popular politician in the world, and it's a good bet she would have lost her seat in 2012 without Todd Akin's help. Only time will tell how interested McCaskill really is, and whether or not this story will fade for Koster.
Other Races:
• Austin Mayor: We have one more major election in store for 2014. On Dec. 16, voters in Texas' capital and the nation's 11th largest city will go to the polls for a runoff between attorney Steve Adler and Councilmember Mike Martinez. The race is officially non-partisan but both candidates are Democrats. The homestead tax exemption and public transportation have emerged as wedge issues in this contest.
Adler outpolled Martinez 38-29 in the first round and he looks like the one to beat next week. A new PPP survey conducted for the Austin Monitor gives Adler a 56-39 lead, similar to his edge in a mid-November PPP poll. Non-partisan off-year municipal races aren't easy to gauge, but we'll know how this turns out soon enough.
• Jacksonville Mayor: Democrats pulled off a surprise 2011 win, with Alvin Brown narrowly prevailing in this conservative city. Brown will be up for re-election on March 24, and Republicans are hoping that his initial victory in Florida's largest city was a fluke. Two credible Republicans are currently in: former state party chair and businessman Lenny Curry, and Councilmember Bill Bishop.
Curry looks like Brown's main contender, raising raising $1.2 million to Bishop's $60,000. Curry has already begun to air ads, and so far he's stayed positive. For his part, Brown has raised $1.6 million. If no one takes a majority in the first round, the top-two candidates will advance to a May 19 runoff.
• ME State Senate: Every cycle several races need to be decided by a recount, though it's rare for the winner to change. What's even rarer is for the recount not only to reverse the results, but for the recount numbers to get reversed again. But that's exactly what happened in Maine's 25th Senate District.
Andy Molloy of the Kennebec Journal explains what happened in this seat, which is located just north of Portland. On election night Democrat Cathy Breen appeared to win a 32-vote victory over Republican Cathy Manchester. However, Manchester requested a recount, and emerged with an 11-vote lead. Manchester was sworn in as a senator last week, but the election wasn't over after all. Breen was the one who challenged the results this time, and she was right to do so. It turned out that 21 votes from Long Island were double counted, and the mistake was responsible for Manchester's narrow lead.
While the Republican controlled Senate will need to vote to seat Breen in January, Manchester has announced her resignation. Breen's win will reduce the GOP's majority to 20 to 15, meaning Democrats will need to net three seats to retake control. Obama won 31 of the 35 seats (and took SD-25 by a 56-42 margin) but voters haven't hesitated to split their ballots here in the past. Democrats still maintain a majority in the state House.
• Nashville Mayor: Music City, USA will be one of a number of major cities to host its mayoral election next year. Democratic Mayor Karl Dean is termed out, and Joey Garrison of The Tennessean gives us a current list of who's in. At the moment we have Councilmember Megan Barry; attorney Charles Robert Bone; former Metro Nashville School Board Chairman David Fox; charter school founder Jeremy Kane; and businesswoman Linda Rebrovick.
The filing deadline isn't until May 21, so plenty of other contenders can jump in. All the candidates will compete in the Aug. 6 non-partisan primary: In the likely event that no one captures a majority, the top-two contenders will advance to the general election. While most of Tennessee is solidly red, Nashville is a reliably Democratic-leaning place.
• WA State House: Washington's legislature has its own crazy saga in LD-30, though not as weird as the situation in Maine's Senate (see our ME State Senate item). Here's the timeline: Democratic state Rep. Roger Freeman (one of only two African-American legislators in Washington) died on Oct. 29. He was re-elected anyway on Nov. 4, even though he was facing a legitimate GOP challenger and even as the GOP was flipping the coterminous Senate seat in this 60 percent Obama district.
On Monday, the Democratic-dominated King County Council picked Federal Way School Board president Carol Gregory to be appointed to this seat until a special election next November, out of a list of three nominees submitted by the district's Democratic committee, per state law. Problem is, this district jogs very slightly into Pierce County as well, and state law states that the council of every county that includes the district must meet in joint session to choose the new representative. So, the GOP-controlled Pierce County Council is demanding a do-over. Even with the vacancy, the Democrats still control the state House 50 to 47, so control isn't at stake here.
Grab Bag:
• Ticket Splitting: So much of what we see in politics isn't some dramatic new development (regardless of what most panicky pundits, whose memory usually extends back to last month, think), but part of a gradual realignment that's occurring on a multi-decade basis. Three new graphs by political scientist Brian Arbour, writing for the Monkey Cage, are worth the proverbial 1,000 words each, in terms of reminding us of the big picture.
One is a scatterplot of 2014 Democratic Senate candidate percentages vs. 2012 Democratic presidential percentages; even with only 12 points, the correlation is clear. The closest we come to outliers are Alaska, where Mark Begich's over-performance almost got him over the top, and Iowa, where the combination of Joni Ernst's charisma and Bruce Braley's flailings led to the biggest Dem under-performance of the state's lean.
Arbour also includes two graphs that track back to 1948. One measures House popular vote against presidential popular vote, and it shows how much House Democrats were able to over-perform their presidential brethren (usually by continuing to win rural southern districts that had gone GOP at the presidential level) for decades, until 1994. Even before you take gerrymandering into account, since then (except, notably, for 2006 and 2008), the Dems' House popular vote has lagged the presidential vote.
And finally, there's a graph of how many "crossover" House districts there are. As recently as 1986, nearly half (close to 200) of congressional districts went one way on the presidential vote and the other way on their House member. This decade, we've seen pretty much the nail in the coffin of ticket-splitting, though, as that number's down to only a few dozen.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir and Jeff Singer, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Taniel, and Dreaminonempty.
